A W3C for IBM Lotus Notes and Domino Web Development

07/03/2008 10:36 AM by Chris Toohey

So, while chatting with Tim the other day... we happened on the topic of how we handle BYO-Domino Web Development. In particular, how Tim doesn't use Form Design Elements anymore to get an individual document, but rather a Page with a GET-like "docuid" QueryString parameter. Brilliant stuff. Me - I use the whole blank Navigator/$$NavigatorTemplate hack, View Design Element Form Formula, and document URL pathing to provide what Domino thinks is a read-only version (thus Treat Contents as _ works fine) of the NotesDocument... while it's really a fully-functional HTML form, etc. - an approach that while "outside of the box" it does have it's drawbacks.

Ideally, I prefer Tim's method, which I've used in the past actually to great success before wanting to render the NotesItems in the UI via Fields or Computed Text. The querystring GET for a NotesDocument lends itself to more of an API-based architecture... which in this world of "I want this to work with that" technology requirements, is where we should all be pushing our applications. So about mid-way through this conversation it hit me - there's no single-place authoratative W3C-like committee/community effort that talks to today's development standards, tomorrow's "this is what's coming up", and (maybe most importantly) deprecated practices.

Is this what the IBM Domino Web Development Best Practices RedWiki was supposed to be? I dunno... maybe I'm just hoping for too much here - but I think this community could take on the challenge of creating (and maintaining) an IBM Lotus Notes and Domino Development... something - Best Practices Guide?, Standards Body?, .... yeah, I don't know what you'd call it, but you get the idea.

I would think that this could be easily done: take IdeaJam, DominoWi ki, host them on the BleedYellow network, and have a community-voted board to oversee what is ultimately a community effort.

Am I the only one who wants such a defined standard? Am I being a foolish optimist here in thinking that this can be done?