Domino Patterns

What a wonderful thing, discovering that some of the people I admire the most in the Notes community found their way to my blog. I learned a lot already from all of you visiting and leaving comments. So last few days, I've not been writing much, but thinking and planning more than ever, especially around us Notes developers joining forces and using the "knowledge of the crowd" to make our professional lives even more fun.

The importance of patterns

"In software engineering (or computer science), a design pattern is a general repeatable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software design. A design pattern is not a finished design that can be transformed directly into code. It is a description or template for how to solve a problem that can be used in many different situations." (from: Wikipedia)

For me, apart from that, patterns are also expectation patterns. If you are developing something, and your solution turns out to be rather unexpected, you probably did it wrong. This happened to my login system: instead of what you should expect, asking only for user name and e-mail address and the possibility of remembering this, I programmed one with passwords, requiring visitors to fill in a person record before they could comment. I need to correct this.

Domino patterns

To me, patterns is a short description of a behavior that recurs often and to which a reusable solution is found. Magnificent pattern collections already exist for Ajax and GUI: Ajax Patterns and the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI). I think we should make one to share the patterns and common solutions we found for Lotus Notes/Domino as well. In my opinion, there's no better application to use for this than the Dominowiki template from Ben Poole. A few of the patterns I would really like to solve once and for all, with all the knowledge of us combined:

• Web document locking.
• Web document versioning.
• WYSIWYG editing for Notes/Web.

I'm sure we will discover a lot more of these patterns that already have known solutions.

Need for discussion

As I am reading the comments on my blog entries again, I notice that sometimes an entry triggers a very interesting discussion, as on using query-open agents or not. Some wiki pages also show this effect. Therefor, MediaWiki, the open source software on which Wikipedia is built, already offers this discussion opportunity for its pages. I think we should build this as a standard feature for both BlogSphere and Dominowiki. In any case, I am going to add it to my own blog application.

About DominoWiki

Recently, I installed a DominoWiki on this server to be able to work on documents together with a collegue. Unfortunately, we couldn't get the security in place in time before he went on holiday, so I'm going to keep it to myself. Maybe we could make a Domino Patterns wiki out of it?

Since we probably also are going to use DominoWiki in my company's intranet, there's a few things on my wishlist for Dominowiki already: making it look more as MediaWiki and Wikipedia, since all employees, including the boss, already are familiar with this GUI. A second thing is making it WYSIWYG. I know it is contradictory to the original concept of Wiki markup, but for directors, managers and sales this markup is just too geeky. And it should include the talk/discussion feature as I mentioned earlier. I'm really looking forward to know from Ben Poole what the future will bring for DominoWiki!