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 major browsers, 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.

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

  • Full compatible with almost all browsers and platforms. 

  • 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 - no 3rd party browser plug-ins are required

  • You get a Profiler too

  • It comes with a huge set of out of the box web 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.

What about Lotus Domino 8.5 and xPages?

Fact is, that to develop xPages one requires Domino 8.5 and the Notes Client/Designer 8.5 (better actually all 8.5.1). That might be for the time being a limiting factor. Otherwise we believe that xPages and Flex/Flash front-end development for Domino do not exclude each other, in the contrary. You can even run a Flex/Flash application seamlessly in an xPage and make the xPage talk to the Flash application and vice versa.

Conclusion

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

Paired up, both products provide enormous synergy effects for RIA development.

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Meet us @ Lotusphere 2010

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Domino Designer 8.5.1
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Adobe Flex Builder 3
Free Licence ... Read more

 

Join us now...

You will be able to post questions, comments or solutions to a problem. You also can download the live samples and any other code we will provide in the future.

Register here

 

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