Jon Udell
Notes 4.0's first public showing, at Lotusphere in January, brought 6000 developers and business partners to their feet cheering. It should debut later this year. Listed below are just some of V4's many improvements.
A single document interface.
Open a V4 database, and you land in a single three-paned window that shows a folder hierarchy, a list of items in the current folder, and a preview of the current item (
see the screen
). It's not a new idea, but it's a big improvement for Notes. In V3, each open document got its own independent MDI (Multiple Document Interface) window. These cluttered the screen and obscured the controlling view.
The current trend in efficient information display favors a single window with subpanes and sliding splitters. Lotus wisely jumped on the bandwagon.
Folders.
For years, users and designers had to jam all database-level information display into collapsible-outline views accessed through the Views menu. In V4, views become folders, always visible--and navigable--in the folder pane. Folders in the view subtree collect documents automatically, based on a selection formula. Another subtree contains truly Mac-like nesting folders that hold ad hoc collections of documents. Other top-level folders hold the design elements and agents used to build V4 applications.
Web browsing.
V4 can work as a native Web browser by means of on-the-fly conversion from HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) to Notes. A gateway server acts like a cache for a whole Notes network relative to the Web, so pages fetched by anybody on the network are available locally to everyone else.
Mor
eover, the local Notes database of Web pages can be fulltext-indexed and searched. If a page isn't locally available, it's fetched from the Web on demand, just as with Mosaic and Netscape. Pages are rendered as normal Notes documents.
If any Notes doclink contains URL (uniform resource locator) syntax, Notes will fetch the indicated Web page. Because the gateway connects to the outside world via TCP/IP, but to the internal Notes network only through the Notes API, it also acts as a kind of firewall.
A cc:Mail user interface.
By popular demand, Notes mail will now look and feel very much like cc:Mail.
Location configuration.
With Notes V3, it was a challenge to manage multiple replicas of a database where each was appropriate for use in a different location: the office LAN, home, and a hotel room, for example. V4 keeps all replicas of the same database as a stack of icons that appear as a single icon on the Notes desktop.
V4 also stores connection r
ules for each location. When you select your location, the appropriate icon bubbles up to the top, and that replica becomes current. You can customize replication for each replica, so the laptop version might replicate headers only while the LAN version replicates all fields, including attachments. And you can control the order of replication, so when time is short, you can be sure that your mail replicates first.
Improved formatting.
The one-line-per-title constraint of V3 goes away; V4 supports multiline rows. Bullets, revision marking, and better table formatting are other welcome enhancements.
Viewlinks.
When double-clicked, a doclink displays the referenced document. Analogously, a viewlink displays an entire database view.
Collapsible sections.
Large documents can now be divided into collapsible sections. This technique aids the development of work-flow applications, since the parts of a document that are shown or hidden can vary on
a per-user basis under programmatic control.
Subforms.
V4 extends the inheritance capability of V3 with subforms, so documents can share common content within or across Notes databases.
A nonscrolling button bar.
In V3, a button that invoked programmed actions appeared on the surface of a document and could disappear when a user scrolled through the document. V4 allows the use of a fixed region for action buttons, so they're always visible and accessible. The button bar can react to, and reconfigure itself for, changing values in database fields.
Graphical navigators.
The default controlling metaphor for a database view is a folder hierarchy, but an alternative one is an image (a map, for example) with hot spots that, when clicked, drill down to the next level of detail.
LotusScript.
V4 continues to support the Notes macro language, but it can alternately use the far more powerful and convenient LotusScript, Lotus
's standard embedded programming language. LotusScript uses Visual Basic syntax with object-oriented extensions, features an integrated debugger, and can call components and DLLs--notably those that package the Notes API. In design mode, all the methods and actions available to the LotusScript programmer are displayed in browsers.
Actions.
Triggering on such events as opening a document or performing a search, actions can take three forms: simple, formula, and script. A simple action requires no programming at all. You might, for example, hook the "send newsletter summary" action to a periodic search agent so that every search automatically mails a list of found documents. More complex actions can be programmed as formulas (i.e., Notes macros) or in LotusScript. Third-party applications can expose their own actions to Notes by means of an FX (field exchange) extension called NotesFlow.
Server management.
V4 won't compete with NotesView, the new Hewlett-Packard O
penView-based management console for Notes, but it will offer baseline management tools to help administrators monitor server usage, analyze mail routing, and trace document flow.
OLE 2.0.
As OLE 2.0 clients that support in-place editing, V4 document repositories can more seamlessly integrate host applications. LotusScript can drive applications that export OLE automation hooks. As an OLE automation server, V4 will be controllable from the outside by OLE automation clients. Some of the V4 user interface will be available for scripted control, as well as much of the API, according to Ray Ozzie.
Agents.
V4 public agents are like V3 periodic macros, but they're server-based and can be written in LotusScript. They automate things that otherwise might be handled by server add-in tasks. Personal agents, which can run on workstations or servers, support per-user customization.
Pass-through authentication.
V4 allows access to multiple Notes serve
rs on a single call.
Faster replication.
Field-level inheritance, and a faster method of exchanging replica IDs, should speed replication dramatically.
Scalability.
V4 more aggressively exploits SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) hardware than V3 did and should also scale more effectively. It can run multiple replicator tasks concurrently on an SMP system, which should relieve bottlenecks in densely connected replication topologies.
Virtualization.
A single V4 server can act like many independent virtual servers, each with its own set of users and databases. Why is this useful? With the advent of public Notes-based services such as AT&T Network Notes, it's handy to be able to divvy up server resources in this manner. A small company that can't afford to rent one of the boxes in AT&T's server farm will now be able to rent part of a server.
screen_link (72 Kbytes)
A three-pane, Smalltalk-style browser packs a wealth of information and contextual clues into a single, efficient display.
Jon Udell is a BYTE senior technical editor at large. He can be reached on the Internet or BIX at
judell@bix.com
.
In The Pipeline: Notes 4.0
