FlexDomino.net - Adobe Flex and Lotus Domino Open Source Community

We are proud to announce

n-Mobility is a lightweight Lotus Notes^© client. It is designed to enable any existing Notes database for mobile devices...

soapgate Q! 2.5 is now open source...

FlexDomino.net

FlexDomino.net is a community platform for developers of two very distinct development worlds. On one side there is the well established IBM^® Lotus Notes/Domino^© platform and on the other hand there is the Adobe Flex^© RIA development environment.

The idea is to combine the best of the two worlds and provide ideas, help and of course code samples to give those who are interested an easy head start. We will also initiate a couple of open source projects and discussion forums you are invited to join.

What is Adobe Flex?

The Flex SDK is a free, open source framework for building highly interactive,expressive rich internet applications (RIAs) that deploy consistently on all majorbrowsers, desktops, and operating systems. It provides a modern,standards-based language and programming model. Flex also includes a rich component library with plenty of proven,extensible UI components, as well as an interactive debugger and profiler.

And if that isn't enough, there are plenty of free and open source components available on the web, as well as commercial products. One worth mentioning in this context is ILOG Elixir, mainly because it became recently part of the IBM product portfolio! This gives the idea of Flex & Domino an interesting twist.

Why use Flex...with Lotus Domino?

The Domino server is a proven, reliable and most of all secure database platform, providing mail, instant messaging, custom build applications and much more. And whilst Adobe is promoting its own back-end platform named LiveCycle, if you already have a Domino back-end in place, there is hardly anything which will convince you to change it.

The Notes Designer as Domino's application development tool for both, the Notes Client and the browser, is a great tool to rapidly develop applications for the Notes Client, however, it is in some aspects less so for advanced web development as well as for development for mobile devices.

There is where the Adobe Flash Builder and the Adobe Flex SDK can fill a gap. There are a number of advantages the Adobe Flex Builder 4.5 has when it comes to web and mobile device development compared to the Notes Designer. To just name a few...

Flash is full compatible with all browsers and platforms, except for iOS based mobile devices that is (as Apple does not allow Flash on iOS).
Adobe AIR (however) provides the means of addressing even the iOS market. A Flash Builder project can be compiled for the leading mobile OSs: QNX (Blackberry Playbook), Android and iOS (iPhone and iPad). Of course it can also be used to build slim client applications for standard PCs - removing some of the browser limitations.
It is not only Eclipse based, but adheres to the Eclipse plug-in standards (you can run it stand-alone, but also as plug-in in your other Eclipse environments).

The IDE provides a debugger that links into the web-browser as well as into the supported mobile devices - no 3rd party browser plug-ins are required.
You get a Profiler too.
It comes with a huge set of out of the box components and an open source SDK
It uses an asynchronous AJAX like coding methodology without the need for any extra line of code or coding considerations. The SDK just does it for you.
Last but not least, with our FREE Community Server Edition of soapgate Q! - our web service based data access API for Domino - and the open source Flex libraries for soapgate Q! it is fairly straight forward to build Flash and AIR applications that access a Domino backend.

Conclusion

Flex is a fantastic front-end development platform for RIA and mobile applications, but by design it doesn't provide a database back-end, only the communication interfaces.

Paired up, both products provide enormous synergy effects.

Flexdomino.net downloads of open source material is now available for unregistered users.

The Flexdomino.net forum has now joined the forum of Qkom.de. Flexdomino.net will provide basic support through this forum.