Now that Lotusphere is complete, it's time for some detailed explanations of the Domino Facelift. While Dwight and I were thrilled that a number of people "got it" and validated the concept, we're also disappointed in ourselves as there were many who didn't get it or failed to see the value in it. Here's the start on a series of articles and screencams to really go through it point by point.

Please remember, this is a framework that is being contributed to the community. This is not a "product in development". Yes, we hope to capitalize on this framework, but from the perspective of making it faster for us to accomplish things for our clients in our own consulting engagements, not from "selling" it. By extension, if it makes things faster and easier for us, and it's available to everybody to build upon, then others can also benefit and everyone should be happy

What is the Domino Facelift? The driving goal of the framework is to provide a consistent toolset that makes Forms and Views observe and use the properties specified in the Notes Designer. If a property is implemented by the Notes client, why shouldn't it also be implemented by the browser client. If there is a rich UI experience in the Notes client, why shouldn't there also be a rich experience in the browser.

As examples, if a form designer has specified the use of a Calendar picker and a "date only" value for a Date field, the Notes client provides it and the browser doesn't. That should come to an end right now!!! It shouldn't take a vastly experienced Notes/Domino developer to hack every form to make one available to the web. On the view side, why the heck don't we have scrolling views, document selection, document preview, type ahead, and a host of other things we're accustomed to from the Notes client. It's only been 6 or 7 years since the Domino web engine came to life, couldn't something have been done by now? Well it hasn't, and it might not ever. DWA (Domino Web Access) gets us tantalizingly close, but it's not readily available to the rest of our development environment.

So it's time to take things into our own hands and provide a framework that does. It needs to be:

• standardizable
• skinnable
• scalable
• scentralized

Ok, so the last one was a stretch. Bear with me, it's been a very, very long week and I'm about ready to collapse.

Next...on to Forms and how we can deal with them.

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