During last week’s MWLUG, there was a clear sense that things are a little different this year. Dave Navarre dubbed the technical implications “platform agnosticism”, while I geared my presentation towards the feeling that change is in the air.

This is not totally new. Red Pill Now cast aside the XPages UI layer and most of the assumptions of Domino development to move to a new level; PSC's presentations have long developed a polyglot tone, and this ramped up this year; and people like Paul Withers have been growing with tools like Vaadin.

It's not too important to dive into the specifics of market forces or the shifting sands of technology, and the platform defensiveness that we tend to wear as a cozy blanket doesn't serve anyone properly. Our beloved Domino app-dev platform has grown pretty long in the tooth and it doesn’t seem like it’s in for a revitalization.

The situation is, fortunately, an opportunity.

One of the things I hoped to convey in my presentation is that, though the prospect of learning some of the ever-changing array of modern development tools is daunting, it is also exhilarating and profitable both professionally and personally. As insane as the tangled web of server frameworks, JS optimizers, language transpilers, automation tools, dependency managers, and so forth may seem, particularly compared to the simple days of Notes client development, there is a great deal of good news.

The popular tools are awash in documentation, with clear examples for doing basically whatever you will want to do. There's also a lot of conceptual overlap and familiarity: if your tool of choice loses favor, it won't be a start from square one to learn the next. And it's not required to learn every single thing that comes along. If you build yourself a Java web stack using, say, Spring that does the job, it's not also necessary to learn every single new client-side JS app framework that comes along.

And, in the mean time, there's a lot of great work left to do with Domino. There are XPages applications in use and development, and these will go a very long way. Domino remains a very capable platform, and the path through XPages can be a very natural lead-in to other technologies, especially if you focus on the aspects that carry on: Java, data separation, REST services, and so forth.

For my part, I, too, still have great work to do on Domino and XPages, but I'm also expanding beyond it with eyes open. As I mention frequently, I believe that Darwino is the best path for a number of reasons. When I have the opportunity, I plan to start getting into the meat-and-potatoes reasons why and examples of how to actually use the thing. Time permitting, I hope to have a series at some point for converting my blog over to a Darwino+JEE application, and I'll share my process of picking my tools and replicating with its current NSF form as I go. If all goes well, it should serve as an example of taking an existing XPages app and transforming it into something new.

This is an opportunity, and it's an exciting time.

Postscript: This is the optimistic take, granted, and some people’s situations are a bit more dire. Admins, I imagine, are in a strange spot (I hope you’ve been brushing up on ancillary tools!), and a lot of companies are doing a lot of hand-wringing about the future for app dev and maintenance as well, particularly those with a heavy Notes-client dependency. My point is that it’s not necessary to get too mired in the doom and gloom.