So you want to be a Domino developer - revisited

It has been a long time since part 1 and a lot of things have changed since the original graphic. XPages came along, Dojo got some decent documentation and everything became social. However the the graphic hasn't changed that much:

There's ServerSide JavaScript and XPages, which isn't hard to snap up if you had sufficient exposure to JavaScript and XML (as suggested before). For die-hard-LotusScript-Forms-Only developers the new HTML/JavaScript driven way of doing things is a big learning curve. There is a Domino Designer that looks more and more like an Eclipse plug-in (which IMHO is a good thing) and made you put SSD and RAM on the Christmas wish list. What is new (and don't tell me next year you haven't seen it coming) is the convergence in all IBM APIs towards a set of common standards. Moving forward you must make yourself familiar with them. In a future version of Notes they will become the API of choice for exceptional work experiences (I shamelessly borrow a term from IBM marketing here). Since you are already familiar with XML, HTTP and JSON, these APIs are actually easy to comprehend:

• ATOM Publishing Protocol (AtomPub): XML based format for reading and writing information with structured meta data. Properly implemented is makes heavy use of Dublin Core meta data descriptions. ATOM is behind a lot of data exchange and API including OData (the format Microsoft and SAP have committed to). There is Apache Abdera for Java, support for Atom in Dojo and even jQuery
• OpenSocial: Framework to build applications for integrated experiences. The title might be a bit misleading, since it is much more than "add a share this" button to your page. It is a complete widget definition and interaction standard. Extends iWidgets. Both IBM Portal as well as the IBM XPages server will be both OpenSocial containers and widget contributors. Already today a Domino server cann serve a component in RCP Widget and iWidget format, so we can expect that the component model will support OpenSocial too
• ActivityStreams: While OpenSocial defines interaction up to the UI level, ActivityStreams are the pipes feeding new information into your experience. The ver brief definition: ActivityStreams are ATOM data feeds that have at minimum the agreed set of attributes ad defined by the ActivityStreams working group. I expect ready ActivityStreams controls to first appear in the XPages Extension Library before they move to the product core control set
• Last not least the IBM Social Business Toolkit: It brings all the above components together. The real remarkable aspect: As of today there is no shipping IBM product supporting the full API, nevertheless IBM provides a working test environment, so you can test and be prepared

From my training experience I can tell: If you grew up with web standards, developing on the XPages platform is fast and fun.