Application development
So let's talk application development. As was mentioned when we discussed Vulcan, Lotus have a refocus on application development and app dev tools. A whole keynote session discussed application development.

The key focus is that the application of the future will broadly be a Web application, or rather one that is based on Web standards. It will be delivered not just via a conventional browser, but on mobile platforms, both sometimes-connected local apps as well as via a mobile browser, and also through rich clients like Lotus Notes itself.

Expect to see more more use of existing and new open standards including OpenAuth and OpenSocial, and the use of open source repositories, as well as HTML5, CSS3, and so on.

XPages will continue to develop, so that you can use them to develop widgets and portlets, as well as there being XPage execution environments for mobiles.

Domino itself will get RESTful APIs.

And IBM are continuing to get the message out and to engage with developers via OpenNTF, via the designer forums and wikis at Notes.net/DeveloperWorks Lotus, and via attendance and speaking at the various resurgent user groups -- which are now common in the US and all over Europe, as well as other parts of the world.

Get involved yourself via the IBM forums and wikis, user group membership, and public tools like IdeaJam -- which, by the way, Lotus pay great attention to.

IBM have done a significant makeover of the Solution Catalog at Lotus Greenhouse. And finally, to go with Domino Designer now being free, IBM will provide access to testing server capability so that developers have somewhere to deploy and test applications if they don't have a server themselves.

Wrapping it all up
At the end of Lotusphere is the closing session. It's a time to wind down as Lotusphere comes to an end, where tradition is that the bulk of the closing session is a guest speaker, an entertainer, usually but not always with a technical story to tell.

This year was no exception. Professor Brian Cox gave a tremendous talk about the origins of the universe, and the search for the elusive Higgs Boson using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, where he is part of the multinational team. Look him up on Wikipedia.

He got quite a laugh when he showed a copy of an internal research paper from 1989 on Information Management, by one T Berners-Lee, with a comment from Tim's then manager saying "Vague but Interesting" handwritten on it. This paper, of course, being the foundation of HTTP and so the World Wide Web.