Hacking the 8.5 Designer
If you follow the instructions to enable direct installation of Eclipse plug-ins for a Notes 8.5 CLIENT, you can install the free version of Aptana Studio by pointing to their Eclipse Update Site.
This will make your Notes 8.5 client behavior weirdly. However, it will also make the Studio plugin available to Designer. After that, it's a question of going to your preferences menu and setting file preference controls for .js files. Note: you can also do this with .css and .xml and even .java files...
So while I'm as disappointed as others about the class browser for Lotusscript, on the plus side it looks like every other kind of editing is going to be substantially enhanced.
As a bonus, here's something that ALMOST works. Open a Notes database. Go to File - Import. Select a General - Archive File. Find a ZIP with, say, a bunch of .js or image files in it. Then on "Into Folder" click Browse. You'll see it gives you a list of templates. If you select a template, it throws errors, but apparently that's due only to a small bug in the URL generation. There's a missing "/" character on the URL.
When we heard about the new Lotusscript Editor falling behind in the Design Partner program, my reaction was "if I'm a Notes client developer, what the heck does DDE get me that's new, then?" Well, I'll hassle IBM about not being able to answer my question, but on the plus side, the answer is going to be "quite a bit."
