Any other IDEs for Lotus Notes other than Domino Designer?

Question

Are there any other IDEs worth my time for Lotus Notes development? We're doing mostly LotusScript development and would kill for features of Eclipse or Visual Studio, like "Show Declaration". I know there's an Eclipse plugin for Java development in Notes, but seems like it only does Java, and we have too many pieces of legacy code in LotusScript to abandon it.

Answer 1

Lotus Notes has moved to the Eclipse platform in version 8. You can run the client in 2 different modes, basic mode which is the version we all know or on the Eclipse platform (know as the standard). The IDE is also moving to eclipse, version 8.5 beta 2 is currently available with the new Eclipse based IDE. Bear in mind that it's a Beta version and it's not feature complete.

Answer 2

Time is on our side.

The Domino Designer based on Eclipse is now a free download from http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/ls/dominodesigner/learn.html

It has brilliant Java and LotusScript editors with all the nice Eclipse features like refactoring and typeahead of custom classes.

Every Domino addict should look at this. Admins too, as the above download includes the admin client.

Answer 3

As of version 8.5 Domino Designer is run as an Eclipse application. 8.5.1 will bring a whole ton of improvements including Eclipse based LotusScript and Java editing as well as improvements to performance, stability and XPages.

Matt

Answer 4

The closest thing you're going to find is the Teamstudio LotusScript Browser.

It's not very good, but it is free and that almost makes up for it.

Features:

1. No support for keyboard shortcuts.
2. Not completely integrated into the designer so is a bit sluggish.
3. Only works in script libraries
4. It does have Find Definition and References functionality which are almost useful.

There is also a rumored LotusScript plug-in for eclipse.

Answer 5

Teamstudio sell a number of tools to assist your Lotus Notes development, and it looks like they can do some of the things you want, but it doesn't look like they can be assembled into an IDE.

http://www.teamstudio.com/products/product-index.html

(Disclosure: I worked for a sister company of Team Studio a number of years back, but never had much to do with their products)

Answer 6

You could give the Zeus IDE a test drive. It is highly and language neutral so it might be possible to configure it for Lotus Notes.

Zeus automatically maintains a tags database based on the information produced by ctags, so provided ctags generates tags information for Lotus Notes it will be able display, browser and search this tags information.

PS: If decide give it a test drive and find it does not support Notes correctly, feel free to post a bug report to the Zeus forum.

_{(source: zeusedit.com)}