Comments to the last post clearly show what I have suspected - if we are going to switch to XPages and want the same level of flexibility and reusability that we have with the current LotusScript framework, then it is only Java that counts.

And I am OK with that - I have only limited experience with Java, but I do have solid understanding of object oriented programming as I have previously programmed / developed in C++, UML and ADA 95. And of course LotusScript.

Learning Java will thus involve learning the new syntax and some other language specifics, but should go rather smoothly. Stephan H. Wissel was kind enough to recommend books Head First Java and Thinking in Java as well as to recommend installing BlueJ IDE for learning Java. Nathan T. Freeman also stressed the importance of using a proper IDE (Eclipse) for doing Java development.

Still, there is one area that needs to be addressed. Learning Java is one thing, but applying the knowledge to XPages development is completely another. I remember when I was learning how to do OO development with LotusScript. I had no problem learning how to create classes, but it did take some time before I learned how to properly apply them to forms, views and other design elements. At that time I found the article Using the object-oriented features of LotusScript from developerWorks extremely helpful, as well as some presentation slides by Bill Buchan. Finally, having access to a production application that uses OO LotusScript framework helped iron out last outstanding issues.

At the moment, I can't find similar resources covering Java and XPages available online. Hopefully, by the time I finished with Java 101 someone would have posted an interesting article (tutorial, video...) explaining how to bring it all together - Java and Managed Beans and XPages and...