Domino Designer has moved to the Rich Client platform, to take advantage of Eclipse features, but also to provide a new, and cool Designer experience. Designer hosts the new XPage design element type, which allows up-to-date Web 2.0 applications to be developed with the same ease as we've always known for Notes applications, in a thoroughly modern manner and with significant new capabilities.

The Notes 8.5 client didn't get much new capability this time round. There's an update on the Sametime embedded client, there's a new Sametime Primary Contacts sidebar element, and the ability to drag and drop elements of rich text both inside the same field, to and from other fields in the same document, to other documents, or even to other applications.

8.5.1
But that's not really what you want to hear. You want to know about Notes and Domino 8.5.1, which we should see around August or September, if all goes as expected.

Now, please take some of this with some salt, because some of this might not happen in 8.5.1. Lotus now plans to ship functional updates as well as maintenance in point releases. This means that updates can come more frequently, and with an agile development method, and release content is now committed later in the release development process than before.

Directory Independence
Firstly, to follow the configuration and full directory split that happened in the 8.0 release, 8.5.1 should deliver Directory Independence. This allows the Domino directory on all servers to be just a configuration directory, with the detail of people coming from another directory, such as Active Directory or some other LDAP directory.

The idea here is to reduce the need, and the costs, of running multiple directories, where installations already have them and don't use Domino as the master directory in the shop.

XPage in the client
Next is XPage support for the client, which means that the power of XPages comes to the client and enables new and more compelling and visually attractive applications for the client (have you seen the 8.5 Discussion Template's XPage web makeover?).

More importantly, this means that the developer really will, once and for all, develop an application once, and it will run on both the client and a browser without all the duplication of effort that the current application development scenario implies.

And XPages will work offline in the client, too. But, sadly, XPage support for the client actually appearing in 8.5.1 is a little uncertain; there is still work to do. Lotus doesn't want to commit to delivering it in the 8.5.1 client right now, and then be forced to delay an otherwise complete release by having to wait for it.

The core XPage functionality will also get some updates too. Currently you can only connect an XPage to Domino data sources - document types or views, Coming along will be the ability to do native binding to other data sources, Expect to be able to use DB2, Alloy (wait a moment), and probably other sources too, like Oracle.