This last week about 50 other specially invited people visited HCL America in Chelmsford, MA for a tour of their Collaboration Workflow Platforms (CWP) office. I was one of the lucky ones, and for two days we got to meet many of the engineers at HCL and see what they were working on around Notes and Domino. There are some parts that are under NDA, but I will talk about what I am allowed to mention.
We got to play with the latest build of Notes 10, compiled that same morning. It included some of the new Lotusscript classes we have heard about before, like the NotesHTTPRequest class and NoteJSONParser class. That functionality had just been added in right before our visit (it is not available in the private beta that was released a few weeks ago), but when I tested it (yes, we got to play with the code right there!) it worked perfectly.
This is a testament to the skills of the HCL developers. Most of them came over from IBM, and you probably know many by name. But there were also new-hires, and HCL is looking to fill many more positions in the US. The investments HCL is doing in this is impressive, and the whole atmosphere was extremely positive and filled with excitement.
We were split up into smaller groups and were treated to a number of very interactive presentations of the directions taken in different areas. The biggest focus was on application development, and with the addition of support for node.s to the platform and the new classes in Lotusscript, the engineers were visibly excited to be able to show off what they have accomplished.
The HCL developers have the right to be excited and proud. We were treated to two major announcements. The first one is a new extremely fast query language called DGQF (Domino General Query Facility). It is not an add-on, but part of the core code. It will be available in Notes/Domino 10, and can be called from everywhere, using Lotusscript, Java, Formula, and Javascript. Initially the searches can be made only in one database at a time, but in the future there will be support for multi-database searches.
At CollabSphere 2018 in just over a week, there will be presentations on DGQF. If you have’t registered yet, do it now. You don’t want to miss this!
The second announcement is under NDA for now, but I would expect for something exciting to be announced at CollabSphere, as well as at later conferences like ICON UK in September.
So stay updated by attending user group conferences during the fall, leading up to the release of Domino 10 at some day in some month, who may or may not contain a 10. I am very excited about the future of Notes and Domino!