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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I would counter with the question, what benefits does backward compatibility provide to new customers? The Notes/Domino client base is shrinking. The number of companies for which backward compatibility is beneficial shrinks every year and so does the benefit of maintaining it. Just because an application runs in 64 bit mode, doesn't mean there aren't 32 bit sections included to maintain compatibility. Look at all the limits that are inherent in Domino forms: 32k in text fields, 64k RT paragraphs, 1GB RT max size, 64 columns in a table, 255 rows, 350k limit on doc import, etc. Someone writing an application with a MongoDB data store doesn't have to worry about data type limits, because it's all JSON (BSON). While backward compatibility SHOULD be a major concern to IT managers, Microsoft has effectively destroyed that mind set because you always have to upgrade everything when you make changes. Has MS suffered because you can't run Windows 3.11 programs in Win 10? People hate the Notes client in no small part because it looks old. There are limits on how far it can evolve because you're maintaining backward compatibility. Another way to look at my request is this: If you were to build Notes/Domino today, using only today's technology, what would you keep, improve, and throw away? Would you rebuild LotusScript, or just use JavaScript? Would @ functions become JS libraries or would they just be redundant? How would you improve replication? The OpenNTF Domino API is an example of how things could be made better. To be clear, I'm suggesting creating something that allows for easy transition from old to new, not just walking away from the established base. Update the current Domino code to bring existing apps up to date (or close to it) and have a "clean slate" Domino server that can be added into the environment to provide current technologies (allow apps to be built on any platform etc). Provide tools to transition data from old to new, maybe even convert old design elements into HTML/CSS/JS automatically. Sorry for the long response.
A 64 bit Domino server exists. Can you please explain what benefits the lack of backward compatibility would have for customers?