If you have downloaded the new XPage Extension Library and read the documentation then you may have spotted what might be a hidden announcement.
The XPages Extension Library Demonstration database is also checked in the SVN repository. It uses
a new extension to Designer that is available as a separate plug-in, running on top of Designer 8.5.2.
That’s right, very soon we could be seeing proper SVN support for the Domino Designer client for NSF files. The plugin is only available to IBMers at the moment but hopefully in the future it will be released for public use.
This is great news for developers everywhere that work in a team with other developers and also for OpenNTF projects. Proper team development environment at long last.
I really hope this plugin appears soon.
Dec's Dom Blog 
Heh.
The OpenNTF Steering Committee had to have a special vote to authorize binary-only downloads in order to provide a vehicle for this. There’s special rules for what’s allowed, but the new policy should be published soon.
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Hello,
Wow!! it is nice to hear. I am always loosing in a battle of discussion with other technology guys about configuration management tool.
If this feature comes, i am sure i will be the winner 🙂
I really want to congralute the team and thank you very much for the good post (news).
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why is there nothing communicated about this and timelines?
IBM always shouts about return on investments regarding Notes, but for those who are reviewing source code alternatives it would be nice to know how investments in any tool will pay out.
I hate to see pay one day for solution S and the other day solution Y becomes an alternative…
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@Nathan : well it requires dxl full round trip working as well, which is not the case AFAIK.
Olivier.
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@Yogi – to my knowledge, the only remaining bugs in DXL round-tripping are directly related to rich text. So for developers who are focused only on XPage development, DXL is perfectly safe… the outstanding round trip issues only impact those who are still using rich text based design elements (namely, forms, subforms, and pages) as user interface elements.
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Declan, I did read that SVN blurb with hope for the release of an SVN plug-in. It’s heartening to read Nathan’s comments from the Steering Committee, so I’m guessing that it’ll have to be ready for release before late January. Cool. Imagine, Lotus Notes Designer would be a grown-up IDE.
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re: DXL fidelity. I don’t know whether they did it, I asked the dev team a while ago to consider allowing a flag to output the rawitemdata version of any richtext, so that roundtripping would be more reliable. You would lose some ability to manage the code updates, but it might be worth it for some more esoteric and older applications.
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The reason you have not heard about it is that it has not cleared IBM legal. Technically, I bet Niklas was not even supposed to talk about it 😉 But it has been in testing with the DP folks since earlier this year.
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@Nathan – I am not sure I will every be ready to trust some tool to determine that I deleted a field rather than you added a field when merging our design changes, or that we made different changes to the same button code.
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