HCL Domino Ideas Portal
Welcome to the #dominoforever Product Ideas Forum! The place where you can submit product ideas and enhancement request. We encourage you to participate by voting on, commenting on, and creating new ideas. All new ideas will be evaluated by HCL Product Management & Engineering teams, and the next steps will be communicated. While not all submitted ideas will be executed upon, community feedback will play a key role in influencing which ideas are and when they will be implemented.
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After the completely abstruse decision was made that the Notes client and Domino Designer will not be (further) developed for Linux environments, we are still lagging behind modern application development. And even worse, we are completely left behind.
It would also be too easy, especially for QA, to pull up test environments with different Notes clients at the push of a button, test your development and then clean it up.
That's what this weird container thingy Docker is for. And hey, HCL makes fun of it and delivers single components in a Docker container (REST API aka. Project Keep).
Only the Domino Designer and the Notes Client ... nope. Who needs something like that either.
The wrong decisions strike the very people who develop applications in the Domino environment, ensuring that enterprise processes are solved with Domino applications.
Apparently, it is normal in the Domino world that applications continue to look like first attempts of a carpenter apprentice from a baroque room - no matter what headstands and handstands we perform to make it look less unprofessional. Usability, accessibility, modern interface (and thus elements that make it possible at all) will still not exist.
And which fool gets the idea to let a development team work on one - well, somewhat complex - task AT THE SAME TIME? In the last century, it was enough for one developer to work on one form. Why should now three people work on the same form, the same script library, the same agent at the same time?
And {placeholder for a supernatural power} forbid that one of this group wants to try out his idea in the code first, without fiddling around in the code of the other group members. Why would such a thing even work? After all, that would help the team to work together on a complex task SIMULTANEOUSLY.
And if in the end it is determined that the attempt to implement it does not achieve the goal, you have to remember exactly what changes were made in the code and then roll them back by hand.
For decades we have been begging for code management to be made available in Domino as well. And even at HCL, they are deaf, blind, dumb and resistant to advice on this topic. They refer to crude configuration tricks and executable batch files, which have to be fired sometimes before the code change, sometimes after the code change. Or one must bend numbers into a confused directory construct, within binary files with a hex editor.
But these building blocks do not come from the manufacturer itself, but from desperate developers who want to put their environment into a somewhat usable state with breathtaking pull-ups.
Dear HCL. You make it damn easy for yourselves here and wonder why the "developer base" doesn't grow back?
I know there is Jenkins. And I know there is Git. But these two worlds can not be integrated in a Domino Developer world, without hacks and restrictions and frequent loss of code and / or design elements.
Still after three decades of begging to enable the Domino Developers to control and maintain their code with existing tools (like git) - IBM failed to open the NSF-container in a reasonable way ... and I don't see any actions from HCL either to help the Developer Community to maintain their code.