Are you new to Web development? Do you regularly build applications for the Notes client but cringe whenever you hear terms like HTML, Ajax, JavaScript or CSS? Do you secretly wish for a resurgence of the Notes client so you won’t ever have to learn Web development? If so, this series of articles is for you.

Really … why bother to learn development for the Web? You may have asked yourself that question many times. After all, the Notes client has been with us for 20 years now, and it’s still going strong. Why can’t you just keep on building Notes client applications using the skills you already have? And with XPages now available for the Web in version 8.5 of Domino Designer and for the Notes client in version 8.5.1, if you do have to learn to build Web applications, wouldn’t it make more sense to just skip over all the basic Web development stuff and go right to XPages?

Unfortunately, as good as both those alternatives may sound, it’s not quite as simple as that.

First, it’s not an “either/or” choice. The skills you’ve spent so many years learning while building applications for the Notes client — using @Formulas, LotusScript, forms, views, outlines, database security, framesets, agents, and so on — are all skills you can use on the Web with or without XPages. Many of these skills are used in exactly the same way on the Web as they are in the Notes client, while others are used in new and different ways, often extending what you can do in the client. But the bottom line is this: You already have a lot of the basic skills you’ll need to build Web applications so, while there’s new stuff to learn, it’s not all new stuff.

As for XPages, while XPages do, indeed, bring some interesting new options to the table for both Notes client and Web applications, to build XPages applications you still need to understand — at a minimum — HTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and JavaScript. XPages are powerful and can do some amazing things, but they are not as easy to build as everyone would like you to believe. And, while there are certainly things an inexperienced Web developer can do quickly and easily with them, my take on XPages is they are a lot more about letting experienced Web developers extend their skills than they are about creating an easy entry into Web development for the newbie. There’s a lot you can do with XPages, but there is a lot you need to learn to be able to do it.

In other words, XPages are not the easy way around the fact you may be behind on the Web development curve. If you want to build XPages applications, you’re going to need most of the same Web development skills and experience you’ll need to build more conventional Domino applications, so you might as well get started.