We all love Domino but most of us developers hate Domino Designer. It's fat, it's slow, it's unreliable, it's based on ancient technology.
On Monday this week I witnessed the future of app development - without a heavy IDE but somewhat "on Domino". I cannot provide further details but what I saw was impressive. A part of it was "Keep", a middleware that I saw "live" earlier this year at Engage. Basically it's a layer between a platform and a consumer, a client. A consumer can basically be everything, the platform can, too. It's not a product, yet. Domino already is - for decades.
What I saw on Monday was HCL Volt MX.
Richard Jefts wrote about it on LinkedIn on Oct 8:
I am thrilled to share that we are launching Digital Week 2020, an incredible, week-long event — live from everywhere — where we will be announcing multiple new releases in our Digital Solutions portfolio: a reimagined HCL Digital Experience, a preview of Domino v12, the global launches of Connections V7 and Sametime Premium, and the exciting world premiere of HCL Volt MX , a game-changing multiexperience platform (formerly Kony Quantum).
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-6719969744436412416-BccA
To keep things clear: technology-wise HCL Volt MX has nothing to do with HCL Domino Volt. The term "Volt" is just something HCL wants to be understood as their Low-Code idea in general.
"MX" stands for "multi-experience" - and I gathered a clear idea of what this could mean.
If you google for "Kony Quantum" (as mentioned in Richard's post, service link here) you'll find a full-stack platform for developing modern apps that run cross-platform and also as native apps. The business logic stays where it always was (or where it should be, in the backend) and data exchange is done entirely via REST. This is where Keep comes into play, the layer that manages requests and responses (IMHO just my simplified explanation).
I have to say I didn't totally get the whole schema behind the demo I saw, but the backend was a legacy Domino app, the frontend was a native iOS app - build in the (currently known) Kony visual designer - whose name I forgot.
Andrew Manby just published a blog post about HCL Volt MX here: https://blog.hcltechsw.com/volt-mx/meet-hcl-volt-mx-a-game-changer-for-your-business/
Long story short, if you want to learn what I tried to explain in this post, then just register for the HCL Digital Week in early November/December. "Thanks" COVID this is a free full week of information form HCL (as a replacement of a "Think"-ish event). Even the next factory tour is included in the registration. If you have the time to join the various sessions (check the agenda first!) about DS, DX etc. then register now!
https://www.hcltechsw.com/events/digital-week