8.5 Designer
The big 8.5 news had to be Designer -- and it will be Eclipse-based, this time round. It will still be our familiar Domino Designer, but with so much more. When a Notes application is opened, it comes up as an Eclipse project, and can be presented to Eclipse as virtual files, if you like, so you can then use traditional Eclipse tools such as source code management, if you want.

Many, but not all, of the design components have been fully made over, even to the point that the properties box had been converted to an Eclipse properties pane. Expect that some components will still look as now, and still display the traditional properties box.

Hopefully the complete make-over will be done by the following release. In those items that have been made over, just about every single property can now be computed at execution, giving much greater application development and deployment flexibility.

What has been made over are all the script editors -- including, at last, a complete class browser. In the same way, design objects that are basically files such as CSS, images, JavaScript and so on all get new Editors. There may not be a fully working Script Debugger, however, in the first release.

A fully kick-ass Web app environment
Now, between Designer and the Domino server is the intention, as Bob Balaban puts it on his blog and in his session, to make Domino a fully kick-ass Web app environment again. And it looks like they're going to deliver. You'll get full Web 2.0 opportunities, generating better applications with less hand-coded HTML and JavaScript and much more point-and-click RAD work.

Core to this is the new xPage design element-- which may not be what it finally gets called. This is completely new element, one that's based on work from Lotus Component Designer and which is implemented as a JSF.

Basically an xPage will represent a Web 2.0 page. Such a page can draw data from a variety of different sources and is not connected with a single Notes document. It uses Ajax under the covers, both with XML and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) to draw data from different sources, not necessarily Domino, and only updates that part of the screen that's changed.

No longer will there be a server round-trip of the whole page every time something happens. Under the covers will be an implementation of the Dojo JavaScript framework on both server and client. You'll also get REST support, too. And did you know that since Domino 7.0.2 the viewname?readviewentries URL can also be used to return view data in JSON format? Using viewname?readviewentries&outputformat=JSON will do the trick.