Don't know if you've been listening to the new podcast in town: Yellowcast. For Notes geeks, by Notes geeks (sorry Adam for stealing your line). Chris Toohey and Tim Tripcony do a great job. In their 2nd episode one of the subjects was about splitting your data from the UI when doing Notes development.
Sorry guys, but I don't agree !

Notes was and still is a RAD tool.

When creating a form, you sort of define your data structure too. This form contains most of your UI: fields, buttons, images, workflow,.... When you use it to enter data, it is stored into a pool of documents (your backend data). Every time you want to see this data, you usually use this form to (re-)present it.
Chris and Tim said that it was far better to use (a series of) dialogboxes to gradually expose data to the user to fill in data, and have a background script do all the work to create data. Now to me, this is certainly an option in some cases, but a form remains the most used way of reading and editing data.
Second thing they talked about was views. Here they compared Notes views to views in a relational database. An RDBMS view is a 'calculated' way of representing structured table data. A Notes view, when visible to the user, is a UI element ! Granted, it contains a select formula to filter data, and (calculated) columns, but it also contains buttons and possibly scripts. What's wrong with this ? You always need a way of showing data in a grid to the user. Views happen to be the way to do this in Notes. Hidden views, used mainly for lookups can be compared to views in a relational db.

What I'm trying to convey here (and I know it sounds poorly) is that you should not try to force Notes into being a split development environment vs data-store like e.g. .Net development.
Notes is both at the same time, hence its inherent power ! There's nothing wrong to keep developing in Notes as you've always done. You don't have to be 'modern' or web 3.0-ish and develop tiny composite applications, that you'll glue together when it suits you. I have nothing against composite apps, mind you, but you should use them when needed, not because its the 'new' way of doing things.
Notes is RAD, so let's keep it that way !

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