Ever feel like that with XPages? You’re halfway down the path to resolving an issue when you suddenly realize that you can’t get there from here. 

I had given up on XPages. There were just too many “gotchas”. Not that I wouldn’t stand in admiration at times of what you could do with the technology. The presentation, the response time - so many things that became possible (things that often seemed a bit “klutzy” with the Notes client) - were all so incredible. Then, at other times, I would shake my head in disgust as some of the simplest and most straightforward tasks to perform required the most convoluted and complicated means to accomplish them.

And, let’s be honest, over the past 20 years we have been spoiled with the Notes development environment. What couldn’t we do? It seemed like any application could be developed – and developed quickly. What was difficult? Creating fields, forms, views, code – and the debugger was awesome. I think it was particularly not having this latter which, at least for me, was the biggest culture shock in moving from the Notes to the web client environment.

But have you seen XPages lately? I was sort of “forced” to go back in to the technology in order to support an application for one of our customers. By then, however, Domino had moved on to some flavor of version 9 with the extension library integrated into the main product. Wow! What a difference! Even the little “gotchas” progressively disappeared with each successive minor Domino release (or whatever IBM calls them now). Unfortunately though, much of the XPages’ related information out there on the web now has become obsolete (to say nothing about being severely outdated), resolving issues that no longer exist.

XPages is today what you always wanted it to be back then. If you have tried to develop applications with XPages and been frustrated with it in the past, really, it’s time to take another look.

Have you seen XPages lately?