The good and bad about new Lotus Notes/Domino releases
As you can read in many blogs today, IBM has > announced the new release 8.5.2 of IBM Lotus Notes and Domino. Every new release is a good news, since it shows that the development go further and the product will be improved. On the other hand, each release means that every IBM Lotus Notes/Domino-based application has to be tested whether it runs with the new release. Since I work for an > ISV which has some IBM Lotus Notes/Domino-based applications in his portfolio, it means a lot of work. In some of our applications (for example > TimeTracking and > Project Management) we use Java applets as main components. Unfortunately, we have to change the code of our Java applets nearly in each release of IBM Lotus Notes and Domino. I do not know why, but sometimes they did not run with the new releases. A bad example was the release 6.5.4, which was very unstable and we had several problems with the Java applets. Without code modifications the applets run well in 6.5.3 and 6.5.5. But of course the Java support in 8.5.x is much better than in 6.x or 7.x releases. So I hope, that we have not too much work if we test the applications with the new 8.5.2 release.
Rolf Kremer 
Write once, test everywhere. 😉
Volker Weber
August 11, 2010 at 12:20 am
Maybe you should port your java applets to an eclipse view part in a composite application. Java applets in Notes is in my opinion a dead technology with a very weak implementation.
@Volker.
I develop Java eclipse components which works on Linux, Windows and Mac. They work without a change. Write once run anywhere does work if the developer knows about the pitfalls of platform independance.
Ralf M Petter
August 11, 2010 at 11:53 am
We have to support Notes 7.x with the current releases. Maybe we can port the Java applets in the next releases.
rkremer
August 11, 2010 at 8:15 pm