some questions and responses

HCL Notes/Domino 8.5 Forum (includes Notes Traveler)

Subject:

I want to be sure I understand what you are saying about "the tabs along the bottom of the editor" - I assume you mean the property panels? There was no intentional change in that behavior between 8.5 and 8.5.1 - do you have the preference set to minimize Eclipse views when editing classic elements? Any chance you had a different preference value in 8.5? We'd like to track this down, but it would help if you could describe this a bit more.

We no longer open the first database on Designer launch for performance reasons. When we analyzed performance results for 8.5, opening that first database (which may or may not be the one you even intend to edit, and possibly the server wouldn't be up, etc.) was one major contributor to the slower launch time for the 8.5 Designer. It is a tradeoff, granted, but given that we can't be sure you want to edit that one anyway, and the importance of the performance improvements, we felt it was a worthwhile trade.

The Java editor reflects the structure of the Java agent/script library/web service consumer/provider. We actually spent quite a bit of time and tried a few different designs before we and the UI designer settled on this one. Because these design elements are Java projects, and because Eclipse doesn't support nested projects, we also faced some technical restrictions. So in the end, we settled on this abstraction layer that we present as the first screen. We also needed the edit project function from the older Java editor so you could have a place to add the script library and other resources to the project. So while I would love to simply open to a single Java file for these elements, that didn't work with the reality of the Domino elements. How would we know which of the Java files you would want to edit within the Java agent? We could guess the first, but then we could be wrong. We'll investigate the performance again to see if there is more we can tune there. Did you find the old Java editor to be fast? At least the first launch of that always had a measurable delay.

Whether or not the infobox should pop up when a design element is being edited has always been controversial, and we have gotten feedback in equal and opposite directions over the years. For some it's a convenience; for others, an annoyance. I am not aware of this changing between 8.5 and 8.5.1 unless a bug was fixed where we started doing this again after not having done it in 8.5 because of a bug. I think at this point the best option is likely a preference - that way we will only have to worry about getting the right default (which we will probably only succeed at for 50%!)

Thank you for your feedback, we are working hard to make Designer the tool we all want it to be. There are significant enhancements in performance and quality in 8.5.1, but it is very helpful to know which areas we should investigate next, so please continue to let us know.

Feedback response number MLED7X9PXH created by ~Keiko Froponepulflar on 10/28/2009