Whats New in Release 6?

What s New in Release 6?

By Steve Kern

IN THIS CHAPTER

• A Brief History of Lotus Notes
• Major Features of Lotus Notes
• Types of Applications
• What's New in Domino Designer?
• New Design Element Features
• New Language Features

This chapter introduces Release 6 of one of the mainstays of messaging and groupware products on the market today, Lotus Notes and Domino. Notes has survived the doomsayers, the naysayers, market vagaries, and the Internet boom and bust, and has grown beyond the expectations of Lotus Development Corporation itself. It has attracted the attention of one of the industry giants, IBM, who purchased Lotus in 1996 for about $1.8 billion. Lotus is now one of four major IBM brands. The discussion in this introductory chapter is at a fairly high level and attempts to illustrate what Notes and Domino can do for a business. Notes and Domino is a very large product, so it would be difficult to summarize its capabilities in a single book, let alone a single chapter.

Release 6 provides many significant enhancements for developers. Internet development is improved with the addition of JavaScript libraries, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and a built-in HTML editor, just to mention a few features. Extensive support for XML programming has been added, including a new family of classes in LotusScript and Java. There are many new features for designing views, forms, and pages. Autocomplete functionality has been added to Domino Designer, and printing is now available from the Programmer's pane. This chapter serves as a brief overview of what's new, whereas the rest of this book gives an in-depth look at ways to implement the features of Release 6.

First, I'll give a very brief overview of Lotus Notes and Domino Release 6.