Forum Friday: Getting started with Domino Web Development

02/08/2008 11:46 AM by Chris Toohey

This is advice that I would give to ANYONE wanting doing Domino Web Development - whether you're just starting off (which might actually be better), or you're a seasoned pro!

First, I'd suggest that you grab your favorite HTML editor - TopStyle, Expressions, Dreamweaver - whichever. Build your application, including the AJAX functionality and everything, so it's a self-contained solution. This sounds weird, but stick with me here...

Populate your application with some placeholder data (where you want views to display table rows, write out the whole table and include some "placeholder" rows, etc.).

Now, take a look at this application. All you should see - but looking at the markup, is the code. It's only text. Text creates markup, that is then rendered by a browser.

Once you've taken that red pill, you can then start to leverage the data and content management capabilities of Domino, while also seeing how things like subforms, shared fields, <Computed Text>, and all of the other trimmings can allow you to build your real application - and not just a simple web-enabled Notes database!