What's wrong with Lotus Notes / Lotus Domino

Question

I have a client who is using Lotus Domino for their web application/server platform. The client has two "web developers" who are more comfortable with Lotus Domino than more mainstream tools and technologies and are not enthusiastic about making a switch. I have been asked to provide an assessment of why it may be prudent to migrate to a different web application platform.

I would be particularly interested in understanding deficiencies related to the platform as I have very little knowledge of Domino but am very familiar with other platforms.

In addition to the fact that Apache has over 70% of web server market, IIS over 21%, and Lotus almost 0%, what other reasons would you give for moving away from this platform?

Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

1. Development languages / tools. There are no (that I know of) good & free source version control systems for Notes & Domino. There are products available for purchase that provide these functions, but they don't work quite the same as Subversion or other popular systems. As a language, Lotusscript is on par with VB 6. Code auto-completion in even the latest version of the IDE is not even close to what you get from Visual Studio or many comparable alternatives.

2. Indexing performance. Indexing performance can be a huge problem in any system, but index updates in Domino don't appear to happen in quite the same way as in an say MS-SQL server. MS-SQL server appears to update every relevant index with each write, where Domino has an index update process which periodically updates the indexes. In my opinion, this leads to less consistent performance of applications under Domino.

3. Replication / Save conflicts. Being a distributed database, these are issues that have to be dealt with, and no implementation will ever be perfect. The biggest problem with these is not when they are legitimate conflicts, but if you don't do proper document locking, rapid updates (even by the same user on the same machine) can cause problems. This is less of an issue on a single server, web based application.

4. This is a tiny point, but for web-based applications, the inability to add binary information to the response stream is a terrible weakness.

Answer 2

The only thing wrong with Lotus Domino is that it's a distributed database which didn't sell, so they decided it would make a good email platform.

The user interface for the email platform was odd, partially because email isn't really built on a distributed database architecture, it's a client-server architecture. Due to it's distributed database underpinnings, it was possible to better manage email (especially when it came to email retention rules). That actually made problems worse for the majority of users, because now they had something called email, that somewhat looked like email, and acted quite different than email.

I would be cautious about moving away from a Lotus platform. Odds are excellent that there is something behind the covers that made the Lotus platform desirable. Remember that while Apache has 70% of the web server market, they have 0% of the distributed database market. If you know 100% that there's not a single bit of distributed database (or even non-distributed database) dependency, then it's a safe move. Odds are it's not.

Answer 3

Biggest issue is the ever-decreasing market share. There just isn't enough interest in the platform anymore and it can't compete in the email market against Exchange. Eventually it will disappear and there's no point building on top of an infrastructure that's bound to collapse.

Maybe you can convince the developers to move away slowly by using another technology in tandem with Domino. I found that necessary after my company switched from Notes to Exchange email, but was left with dozens of Notes applications still in use. One simple trick is to expose Notes data using XML or the NotesSQL driver. It's very easy to pull that data into an ASP.NET application, or some other platform better suited to Web development than Domino.

Even if they love working with Notes, unless they plan to retire in 10 years they'd better start learning some new technologies anyway.

Answer 4

I have been working with lotus notes/domino since 1996 to build an electronic document storage and workflow system for a law firm (www.proctors.com.au/legalnotes.nsf). I use the notes client for the creation and filing of documents - and everything else - in the office. I use the net to retrieve data. The only disadvantage of using the notes client over the net is that it is slow; mainly - I imagine - because of the code that is being executed.

I am not a programmer by trade and there may be something better, but I have not seen it. I cannot imagine building the security in notes from scratch in something like exchange. I have not heard of anyone building a document management system like mine. I think Notes is a great platform.

Answer 5

The only real deficiency notes has a web development platform is the inability of developers to use its capabilities as well as they might. I've vastly improved the look and feel of a couple of my websites e.g http:\www.meteorflight.com by getting good with css and writing better html but now for the next stage of web application development I need Java as that gives me the ability to do far more.

Indeed there has been a move away in recent years from using the notes client and instead writing internal applications for the browser so end users have no idea (nor do they even care) that its a lotus domino application.

Answer 6

Update...

And now there is Domino XPages, which is a great environment to use for Domino web development. No reason to move away, for it can be applied to the existing databases. Minor drawback: it takes quite some time to learn XPages development.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPages and http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/ddwiki.nsf