The whole Designer-on-Mac / Linux thing has cropped up again of late, and there’s been a flurry of activity around the associated IdeaJam posts too. Bill Malchisky’s post has a very eloquent take on it all.

Some of us have been clamouring for Domino Designer back on the Mac since it was pulled in release five. The Mac OS landscape (and mindshare of course) has changed dramatically since the R5 days, and then IBM came along and added fuel to the fire by using Eclipse as the base for new versions of Designer.

Fire? How so? I hear you ask… Well, inadvertently or not, in using Eclipse for your IDE you’re screaming that your environment will work on more than a Windows box. In the heady days of dreamy possibility represented by Hannover, one of the vaunted plus points for using Eclipse was its expandability, but also the fact that Eclipse is cross-platform.

Sooner or later, if Notes apps are to continue, the aged Windows-based C code underlying the standard Notes client has to be re-written, and then DDE has the wherewithal to become a true cross-platform Eclipse-based IDE of some heft.

But that won’t happen. Why? XPages. Drop the Notes cruft, go with the JSF-based XPages platform. If you have that, and only that, for your Domino apps, you stand a fighting chance of getting a cross-platform IDE^*. Until then, you’re pissing in the wind.

Let me be clear: I don’t mean this as a criticism (which may surprise some readers given my long-standing fondness for Macs). IBM have to pick their battles, and funds have to be apportioned: they’re not going to spend $$$ making layout regions work in Designer on Ubuntu.

^* that said, I still wouldn’t hold your breath if I were you. The Rational / Websphere tooling doesn’t have all this cruft, and that doesn’t work on OS X either.

Filed underos x, dde, linux, lotus notes domino