Comments on: Developers! Developers! Developers!

By: Falling Dominos » There’s an app for that

Falling Dominos » There’s an app for that — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:34:01 +0000

[...] said it before and Neil Wainwright said it again (comment #3) today. Small application development was [...]

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 02:49:33 +0000

I’m not saying end-user development is perfect… but it’s a start.

Lotus Notes jobs were at their highest when the designer was freely available to everyone. If Bob from accounting creates a Notes application instead of his usual spreadsheet… that’s a win for us. So what if we have to support his crap… it’s a job, remember?

To be honest… before I was ever given Visual Basic or Visual Studio… I was an end-user developer because I hit Alt-F11 in Microsoft products. I created some pretty good tools during end-user development.

I used to fear end-user development for the same reason you guys do… but Lotus needs a revival… and I’m not sure the “Eclipse client” is it.

By: Giulio

Giulio — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 02:02:24 +0000

Eek! End user development! Playing with fire there. Letting users build databases is the fastest way to get people building stuff that looks horrible, and probably performs horribly to.. You also end up becoming a QA analyst which is still a drain on your time.

Perhaps as a proto-typing tool ONLY. But I think once you give users access to development you open a pandora’s box as they start to tell you how you should do stuff when or ask you why they shouldn’t be doing something a certain way, or ask you “how do i ….”, and in 90% of cases, they don’t know what competent development is all about. So.. urrrgh! NO!

Agile development requires fairly good developers with diligent practices otherwise you have a mess in no time.

I have seen some execs do this in the past, and you end up wasting alot of time demonstrating the folly of their ways, and also QA’ing their work to make it production safe. Sorry.. I’m a bit of purist for any serious development. And if it’s low risk stuff, it’s probably not worth doing either. So, in the end i can’t see a general justification for allowing users to do any serious development.

PS.. Lurv the Steve Ballmer Monkey dance.. “Developers, Developers, developers!”

By: David Jones

David Jones — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:45:48 +0000

As of 8.5 the only way to access the Designer IDE is through the Standard Client.

Giving all of my end users a Designer client would be a nightmare. However, there are some that I think could build some basic applications with it.

By: Mellow Yellow

Mellow Yellow — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:12:11 +0000

@Tom – good point. I haven’t seen the basic client. Does it include the old Designer IDE? That would be a huge help.

By: Tom

Tom — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:56:47 +0000

Isn’t the basic client installed with R8 Standard? Can’t we give them the Developer client to do “basic” applications?

By: Mellow Yellow

Mellow Yellow — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:46:54 +0000

Typical end users will not be able to work with the new 8.5 Designer client. Heck, average Notes developers will not be able to work with it either.

By: Ed Brill

Ed Brill — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:40:57 +0000

I hear ya, Tom.