What are XPages?

The XPages design element was introduced with the release of Lotus Domino 8.5 and is considered a major shift in Lotus Domino development strategy. Based on JSF (JavaServer Faces) technology, XPages facilitate the creation of Web 2.0 applications and enable the separation of data and presentation. This separation makes it significantly easier to web-enable Notes Client applications or create a mobile device interface for any application.

XPages are primarily driven by JavaScript that can be run server side as well as client side. Lotus has implemented many of the common formula language features and functions in JavaScript with the addition of new concepts such as session scope. There are many pre-built controls as well as an advanced web control library. With well-integrated support for CSS, XPages make it easy to access Java libraries on the server and natively support Domino data (forms and views) and allow the writing of your own Java classes to access virtually any type of data.

Lotus Domino 8.5 includes the Dojo framework which is a JavaScript based library that adds AJAX features to web applications. By leverages the Dojo framework to create partial page refreshes, type-ahead support, and other AJAX-based features XPages can also use some of the pre-built widgets from the Dojo framework.