So what’s up and coming in Domino 8 Designer…

Web Service Consumer. Use Import WSDL
in a script libary to get access to the functions. This creates the classes
in the declarations area of your script library which can be either lotusscript
or java. Then just save the library. then just ‘USE’ the library and call
the functions in the script library. looks very easy and very powerful.

Domino DB2 Integration. In Domino 8
it will be available to everybody, in Domino 7 it was only available to
select customers. You can use it to pull in relational data to your domino
database.

Composite Apps. Using the wiring ability
of Domino 8 you can interact between different components of different
databases in a single screen. In domino designer there is a new type of
design element for compApp properties and CompApp applications. It uses
WSDL to store these properties but it is not  web service. A WSDL
editor will be provided by Domino Designer to help you create your WSDL’s.,
then use either a column’s properties to select the element that is published
during wiring or a new view event called ‘OnSelect’. Action buttons can
consume the event and a new lotusscript class called ‘NotesPropertyBroker’
can be used to talk to the components. Designers should think about what
properties they should publish while building new apps, even if not used
it saves a lot of rework in the future.

View Enhancements. ability to put preview
on the side but also your app can say what columns to display etc when
the preview is on the side so your user doesn’t have to scroll. Split actions
allow the abilty to have a toplevel action that does something and a downarrow
beside it to allow extra actiosn to be selected. Contacts has a new business
cards view. Can all be done in designer 8 for your own apps with new view
properties. There is also the ability to add tooltips from fields in the
database of the selected document. so you could hover over the subject
and have a tooltip of the first few lines of the email message, There is
also a tab navigator that will add the a-z tabs immediatly to your view.

There is also the option to hide all
the rightmenu option so you can have total control over what appears there.

You can now select any column to expand,
so you could have the subject column to expand to use up the window size
even if it’s in the middle.

Thumbnail support. there is a new richtext
lite option called thumbnail that you can specify in your own specified
size. Then you can use these in your views, handy for contacts or any app
that deals with images.

Lots of Script and @ language additions:
 too many to list here.

New agent types. ‘When Server Starts’.
Any agent with this set will execute once when the server starts up.

New database option to stop full text
searching when there is no full text index.

Ability to add seperators to outlines
to make them look a bit nicer.

Eclipse. Full support for designer in
eclipse is being demo’d by Maureen Leyland. This is still in development
and will not be available for Domino 8. Some cool things, script library
class browser. Color coding as you type, not as you go to the next line.
Use plugins for example opening a stylesheet will use an eclipse CSS editor,
Lots of new functionality can be provided.