Damien Katz

couldn't agree more. It is all about the database, followed closely by the progressive loading indexed views. The full text search engine is impressive, but not as impressive as it was before Google existed. Rich text is clever, but CD records have to be described as a legacy approach now we have XML. The rest of the stuff is commodity technology components now. Steve Mills got it backwards, I just wonder if that makes him half wrong, or 100% wrong. There is a lot of effort going in to the user experience for Hannover but I am not sure if they have thrown enough away before building up again.

Excellent piece of writing.

I say "schema-free"
You say "schema-less"
Let's call the whole thing off

YES!
It's the database and the freedom of a schema that dba guard fiercly. Of course that is the achilles heel too. A little schema wouldn't harm .
I think IBM got the wakeup call and a lot of things are happening. (At least I hope so).
:-) stw

Now I understand why so much of the new functionality that has been trotted out is being deployed on DB2 and WAS. It's a combination of an attempt to make use of the work that went into Workplace so it's not a total loss, and this myopic vision that Websphere and Java are the future.

The thing that disgusts me is we're being fed lines about "offering stand-alone functionality". IBM is alienating a fair number of customers in its overzealousness to get everybody on WAS. I wonder if they'll ever see that?

I remember back in the day when people always complained that Notes wasn't a relational database. We used to grab a blank sheet of 8 1/2 x 11 and say "neither is a sheet of paper, but how much of your business operates because of the flexibility of THIS!??!?!"

The kicker is that one person can set up an SMB's Notes infrastructure in an afternoon or less...try that with workplace

I do hope that IBM gets the message...

P.S. Excellent article.

Excellent article, from one who knows better than almost anyone. Domino is on it's last gasp and IBM seems to be completely disinterested. They have weighed losing a few thousand Domino developers against gaining tens of thousands of Eclispe developers and sided with the later. You would think that the disaster named Workplace would indicate that this strategy may not work.

I was saying the above for years during the whole Ambuj\Workplace mess - actually, it started with K-Station, took a wrong turn with Workplace, and has a chance now if Websphere doesn't over-complicate thing.

Notes was about simplicity. While my friends at other firms were struggling to develop or buy applications, I was releasing employee review systems, PO workflow apps, client tracking databases, extranets, etc. IN 1994! Notes was a rock-star.

Now I am jealous when I see a Notes guy go to a non-Notes environment.

Excellent article - you've hit the proverbial nail on the head.

We recently had an application glitch and people descended upon IT complaining that "if we'd used a relational database, the problem wouldn't have occured."

Eventually, the problem was discovered as poor quality data in an earlier system - the very relational MS Access.

Relational isn't half as important as "suitability to task".

I agree with you about NSF, I love it.

But that whole "Mills is killing off Notes/Domino, they're going to force everyone onto WebSphere" is SO 2004.

Yes, it was true (in 2004, in my own personal, non-IBM opinion). No, it's not true today, and (again IMOPNIO) it hasn't been true for a while.

I see IBM investing seriously again in N/D in all kinds of ways. Is the result going to immediately make everyone happy? No. Will it be better over time? Yes. Do I know why I am imitating Donald Rumsfeld? Nope.

Lighten up! There are going to be LOTS of new ways for developers (AND BPs AND ISVs) to make money off this platform in the years to come.

Stephan, as Gavin points out, having a schema doesn't prevent bad data design. I agree that the lack of schema has it's downsides but "achilles heel " is a little too strong for me. For apps that Notes is well suited, I'd rather mitigate the risks of not having a schema than the risks of never delivering a useful application ;-)

@Damien: Amen! :)

Bob: You only have to look at some of the recent comment threads on Ed Brill's blog (and the ones that Damien linked to) to get a sense of how frustrated developers have become, especially Domino web developers. And they're not going to be any happier with Domino web development in R8. It's a "client focused release". Maybe R9? Who knows, no commitment to improve Domino web development has been made so far. So we're talking about solutions that are at least 2-3 years away. In the meantime, IBM is clearly making WebShere, Portal and DB2 a requirement for many of us. Examples: Activities in R8 require WebSphere and DB2 server support (and possibly Portal?). Another example: The new Sametime Gateway requires WebSphere and DB2. And future Sametime servers are based on these technologies.

Domino's HTML rendering is old and clumsy. It hasn't materially improved since R5. Meanwhile, IBM is making it easier to surface Domino app inside Portal. Does this make the life of Domino web developers any easier. Not really. When will it improve? R9? R10? R-Never?

Not everyone is looking for "new ways ... to make money off this platform". Many of us are just looking for ways to be more productive doing what we need to do now.

Coming from an SME Business, simple is better. And Workplace, even in Express version, wasn't simple!

It really does seem to me that since the collapse of the forced Workplace strategy, it is being pushed through the back door, so to speak.

I can imagine the Workplace guys sitting around with lots of unopened licence packs. "Well bugger, the direct assault didn't work. Plan B time. If we can't beat em, we'll join em. They convert to some heavyweight stuff".

I don't want complexity.

Opps - meant to say..

'Then convert them to some heavyweight stuff"

@Charlie - good post.

Thanks Damien, nice article. What's also interesting is that last year there was Sharepoint Portal...but now, it's Sharepoint the document collaboration platform...their marketing sounds like Lotus marketing circa 1994..heck, they're releasing 40 templates too...gee...that sounds soooo familiar. Watching the announcement of Lotus Expeditor was a bit of a downer for me too. The R5 welcome page had soooo much potential. Its like, instead of improving what was already in Notes and Domino...whole other products were created. Bummer.

I like Wolfgang's comment.

Excellent work.

Other factors that make Notes successful. Security is built in. The ability to send email is built in.

IBM seems to be paralyzed when it comes to improving developer tools. They seem to figure that there are many fewer developers than users, so there's no need to make us happy. That's a false economy; if the developers are happy (and effective) they'll use your tools to make the users happy and effective.

Borland's Delphi had the right idea. They made the Delphi code editor replaceable. Anyone could write an editor to take the place of the Delphi editor. If IBM can't be bothered to improve the developer tools, they should at least open up the environment to the point where we can plug our own tools into it.

Can anyone tell me if all the the ongoing Eclipsification of Notes will eventually give us this capability?

Well said, Damien. I'd like to add one thing: it's not just the datbase... it's the symmetry. It's the same database, same security (mostly, in recent releases), same access methods, same indexing, same pretty much everything... no matter whether its on the client or the server. There's symmetry elsewhere in the architecture (e.g., client-server comms are the same, mostly, as server-server), but it is the client-server symmetry in the database that has made the fat client such a durable and powerful tool.

And let's not forget:

- world-class backward compatability,

- a hetrogenious system platform that allows you to scale from a 486 running windows 95 to a multi-node cluster using several different operating systems, software versions and a huge variation in configurations at the same time.

- the flexibility to mix and match different software generations in the same domain without the wheels falling off the trolly.

- a disconnected model that serves to protect data integrity (through several mechanisms including both replication and record locking) and supports disconnected security, disconnected scheduling, disconnected email notifications and disconnected workflow etc.

- a simple elegant model that cleanly separates the data from the code

- allows you to develop a single version of an application across a huge range of windows platforms, apple mac & Linux platforms with a single code base.

- And last but not least, a database platform that runs on either a flat file structure or a Relational database (DB2) and on media that ranges from multi-node hard disk arrays to a USB Memory stick.

Its so funny. I've made the complete opposite experience.
Especially junior programmers like the Notes database, because they have to define very little structure for the data to be saved. For the same reason organizations which are starting with xml often write no dtds or xml-schemas.
This underspecified data appears easier first, but often leads to problems in real production environments. Suddenly there are bugs popping up, because a user happily saves data the database accepts, but the data-processing code of the application developer didn't expect. I've seen that countless times. Reason are those "very eficient" semi-structured data.
Another problem with under-structured data surfaces, when you want to extend an exiting program. Under-structured nearly allways means under-documented, so the program looses cohesion with every version and is going to become harder to extend.

For your own coding you use save practices like junit testing and stuff. But you are going to send application programmers who use your database platform on a walk over much swampier ground :-)

Actually I've seen fading out the usage of Notes as an important application in a lot of organizations. As a application programmer/designer/project manager I have become pretty much easier markatable by adding some more standards/open Source-based skills like Java, EE5, Spring, relational databases, Eclipse-plug-in dev or .NET.
A lot of attempts of Lotus to base ad-on or standalone products of their architecture have failed misserably (Domino Workflow, Domino Doc, etc.)
To call Websphere the market leading java application server is very IBMish, I fear. JBoss appears much more popular these days. Same with DB2 as RDBMS in comparision with Posgres, MySQL or MS-SQL.

Polemical articels like the one linked by Volker Weber reminds me on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolchstoss .
We would all be in a shiny, happy world, but IBM did not "get" Lotus Notes. Get real.

Thanks Damien, this was a valuable piece of writing & discussion.

Notes and Domino is the little engine that could that did everything. For small, medium, and large busineses it does 95% of everything they need. Yes, NSF is not a relational database, but for most applications you do not need it and if you program it right you can get most of the functionality.

The concept of Activity in Notes 8 is not new and we implemented something very similiar in pure Domino code without Java or Eclipse. Though, as a developer I curse and swear about all the problems and bugs that IBM seems to refuse to fix, Notes and Domino is so powerful and flexible. I personally have not done that much with Domino Web development, but the question I have is given the flexiblility of Domino is it possible maybe as a open source offering on OpenNTF to create a Domino-based platform interface that would make it easier to create Web application to the level that Domino Web developers are asking for. I know that some have create Ajax tookkit for Domino. Could the Domino community create a open-source project that address the issues that developers have. From my previous experience with IBM and their promises, you should not count of them to improve the process unless it has Java, Eclipse, or WAS attached to it.

Nice one!

IN terms of editing domino java code from Eclipse, check out http://www.domeclipse.org.

And I understand (but have not yet tracked down) some work on Sourceforge in terms of editing Lotusscript from Eclipse too.

Remember - the raw code itself (java, javascript, lotusscript) *can* be stored in script libraries and retrieved/updated via XML and recompiled via C-API..

---* Bill

I think today is a very different story with Notes and IBM. There is a huge investment going on in the client and now the server - a lot of openings back on the Notes/Domino team. I even hear they need someone to rewrite the @Command compiler - not sure why :). Anyway, I think Notes 8 is a tribute to many people "getting it". With the introduction of Eclipse, Composite Applications and the new designer tools you are going to see a lot of great solutions built on Notes and Eclipse. Sametime 7.5 was the first product based on Expeditor and is proving to be a great concept.

@Bob Balfe: As far as I can tell, Notes 8, Eclipse, Expeditor, etc. won't have any impact on Domino web application development. Tell me that they're hiring someone to rewrite the HTML engine and I'll be happier. But only to a point. As Damien says Domino's "web development tools are outdated and inconsistent and hacky". Tell me that they have a team rewriting Designer as well. And even at that, it sounds like the earliest that any of this work will appear in a shipping product is R9. So sad. It's already long, long, long overdue.

I hate to say it, but MS is going in the right direction with its Sharepoint line, and IBM is going to face an even greater challenge as that fact gets out there. Sharepoint is reasonably priced, can be installed and configured on a server farm in a day, and you can gain productivity from it on day one.

@Jeff,

Yep. Which is exactly why we had the Notes vs. Sharepoint 'out of the box' argument a short while back.

We are an SME (100+ Notes 7 users) and are going to be looking at Sharepoint when the reviews start. I am expecting that the product will be highly rated.

I asked at the time and still have not got a definitive answer as to which products IBM is going to stack against it. I know many companies, for example, that are looking at Sharepoint 2007 for its document handling alone. I'm afraid that the current ones we have in Notes are rather old and, like most of the templates, have not have any refresh for some time.

A real shame considering that document handling is supposed to be the thing that Notes excels at.

@GarryL: IBM's response vis-a-vis Sharepoint may very likely be Websphere Portal. Document handling (or anything else for that matter) is *not* something that WebSphere Portal excels at.

As has been said before, "it's the database,"
It's true when I explain about the relational vs. flat, you get deer in head lights. But the bottom line imho is that I do not have bits of pieces to be found all over the data center to have my apps run. Just the nsf on my server.

Shame about Workplace, but then sometimes you have to hedge your bets and a small step backward should bring a larger step forward in the long run.

Hi Damien,

nice article ;-)

greez

don't forget the search engine which works for quite a long time even with huge databases (at that time)

@Bruce Perry :

>IBM seems to be paralyzed when it comes to >improving developer tools. They seem to figure >that there are many fewer developers than users, >so there's no need to make us happy.

A truer word has never been spoken *g*.

(This agreement comes from a very small development depertment, where we just had to - well, believe it or not - switch back to using the C-API for doing some proper calendaring.)

Right on Damien. I've always found that the first 80% of most Domino applications are just lighting fast. The database is the key. Non structured db with forms and views makes short work of most apps. I'm still not sure that IBM 'gets it' and that they will continue their quest for DB2 and Portal migrations/integration.

@Charlie:

You are right. Websphere Portal 6 is a direct competitor to Sharepoint 2007. And IBM fears it. A lot.

My brother implemented a sharepoint solution for Farmer's insurance, and that's the one and only time he'll admit that Microsoft is doing something right

Excellent article, actually I knew all of this but wasn't able to really make it together.
You did it.
Great post
Thx

Our first looks at Sharepoint were driven by the document management features and our desire to replace Documentum which we have done. We are now working on a document workflow using Sharepoint and Windows Workflow Foundations. Domino could never hope to keep up, and Workplace/WS Portal would require far too much effort to match the feature set.

Last time I used notes I was also using a toughbook, being the kind of emotional person I am, I got so annoyed that I threw the toughbook out of the window, literally! It bounced and was still working when I retrieved it!

I had completely forgotten the experience I had with lotus notes a few years back - I know the brain tries to forget bad experiences.

For me I now prefer apples application suite - but have to use MS Office when working with one of my contracts

Tim