Finally it is here, the new version of IBM Domino. After the world premiere yesterday in Frankfurt, the world-wide launch is taking place today.
The focus in this release is on application development and administration. Features like self-healing of databases and increase of the maximum database size to 256 GB are among the most popular with administrators, while developers have a number of exciting additions.
The two most talked about features are the new Domino Query Language and node.js integration with Domino. Domino Query Language has been written from the bottom up to be fast, and the demonstrations I have seen confirms this. It is fast, very fast! And it can handle searches that would not only take a long time to create in earlier versions of Domino, but would take forever to run. Now the result comes back in a second, or even less. This really blew my mind when I first saw it earlier this year. John Curtis, the engineer that pretty much single handed wrote this code, did an amazing job, fully on par with when Damien Katz rewrote the formula language in ND6 and increased the performance several times over.
The second big feature of Domino 10 is the integration with node.js through the domino-db connector. It will be delivered in a separate application development pack, which will enter beta this week. This is a slight disappointment, I had been hoping this functionality would be available at the launch. But I rather wait the time that is needed for IBM and HCL to make it a fully stable product, instead of rushing something unfinished to the market.
Another product announced today was Notes for iPad, which makes it possible to run existing Notes applications unmodified on an iPad. All the functions we know and love are supported, like replication, offline access to applications, Lotusscript, Formula language, and more.
To support mobile Notes applications, there are enhancements in Lotusscript, for example camera and GPS support. Lotusscript has also been extended with other new classes, for HTTP requests and JSON parsing directly in native Lotusscript. No need to call Java or system API:s anymore!
HCL has done an amazing job in a short time, and Domino is on its way to become a very powerful and extendable platform for modern web development. A company can now not only deploy their existing business applications on iPads, they can also hire young developers who have experience of node.js and modern frameworks/libraries like Angular and React, and have them develop new solutions that can access existing data in Domino databases. Why use Mongo DB for data storage, when you have the much more secure Domino server available?
Domino 10 is not the end point. Domino 11 will be out next year, and IBM/HCL have committed to a long future for Domino. Forget #domino2025, now it is #DominoForever!
If you were not able to attend any of the launch events, here is the live stream from Frankfurt :
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=310707186390803&id=111720058922703
Exciting News!