I had my “road to Damascus moment” recently when I saw the same app run in Xpages on the client and on the web with no extra coding, or more accurately not much extra coding.
I realised that Notes had passed a huge milestone and some of my long held beliefs were unceremoniously dumped. One of these was that customers were best with the Notes basic ( non-eclipse ) client. It is considerably faster and despite working on notes apps full time neither I nor my colleagues had yet had cause to use any of the eclipse functionality.
Now when we are looking at new apps our first inclination is to want to do it in Xpages if it is likely to be a repeatable solution. This is not just because we are geeks and it is fun but because with our business heads on we believe that we have a much better chance of selling that application to potential customers who do not, and unlikely to ever, run Notes clients.
Notes basic was good for getting people with older hardware ( often < 3 years old ) onto newer versions of Notes. That was a very good thing in the battle for hearts and minds. We needed to get them off R5 / 6 and onto something which really showed what Notes could do.
But hang on, is there not a danger that we will be repeating history with Xpages and Notes Basic. If developers mostly want to code in Xpages and as a consequence people with Notes basic will progressively get left behind and, even though they are on Notes 8.x or maybe 9.x. They will have that dangerously substandard experience that is analogous to users being on R5. I am stretching the point a little but I do think that it is a very valid concern.
So do I think Notes basic is a good thing ? Yes I do for now but I think it could quite possibly be a bad thing if it were continued on into Notes 9.x.
Sean