For those who missed Maureen Leland’s presentation on Domino Designer 7 plus Eclipse, Chris Reckling provides a comprehensive write-up of the new breakthrough.

Chris takes us through the steps of Maureen’s presentation, from the features of Designer 7.0, Hannover’s next steps and finally elaborating on the big announcement.

“What if we could provide a better source code editing experience, like a class browser for your code, or to make it easier to develop for a client platform that blends Eclipse and Notes?” Maureen asks a disbelieving crowd. Unveiling a prototype for Domino Designer embedded in Eclipse, Maureen said the current Domino Designer design element ‘editors’ (Form, View, Agent, etc.) can be rendered inside an Eclipse perspective.

The power of the Eclipse platform will be applied to advancing the Domino Designer development environment. The Eclipse script editors can be used for coding up agents or any other place a script exists, the Web Services consumer code can be used as a WP Designer, and the same Navigator can be used to replace Dom.Designer bookmarks or to put the infobox properties into a properties panel, Chris says. “I'm pretty certain that what will remain the same are the primary editors for the Form and View and probably other areas that are very specific to Domino development, in other words, we are not re-writing Domino Designer in Java. What we are doing is smartly adding features to our product set as we go forward in time,” he adds.

Chris explains the rest of Maureen’s presentation with a screenshot, answers to frequently asked questions, such as whether workspace Designer is a pre-requisite to run Domino Designer in Eclipse, whether the existing Lotus Notes/Domino applications can be opened, and details on the specific features being added to Domino Designer.