IBM.com whitepaper on Domino as a rapid application development platform

January 4 2011

This paper was published a few weeks ago and is starting to be merchandised across IBM.com...several bloggers, such as Stuart McIntyre, caught it over the holiday season as well.  

I think this is a helpful document to share with IT managers responsible for application development strategies as to why Domino and XPages are relevant and resourceful.  Combine this with IBM's efforts around OpenNTF.org, IBM's first published case study around XPages, and the quality of XPages story that we received as Lotus Awards nominations (and sessions at Lotusphere such as Brian Benz's story on Deloitte Recap), it feels like we've achieved full liftoff for the go-forward story of Notes/Domino application development.  

The Notes/Domino application development product management mission is in my area of responsibility as of 1/1/11.  Clearly I have a lot to learn, and I'll be relying on Pete Janzen as product manager, Maureen Leland/Philippe Riand and many others on the development team, and a whole slew of new inputs to fully embrace what has been done and what we should be doing from here.  I'm sure we'll never be able to do everything that you all want us to do, but this white paper and these other efforts are a good place to start from.

I like the fact that the first several pages build understanding and agreement about relevant needs and capabilities, and only on page 5 do we hammer home the solution:

The IBM solution for RADD

Based on many years of application development for collaborative and business logic applications, IBM offers best-in-class tools, experience and strategies to help companies obtain near-immediate gains and ROI for custom business solutions.  The open standards-based IBM Lotus® Domino® platform features XPages technology, which provides one programming model for developers to build applications for desktop, browser and mobile experiences. This comprehensive platform integrates secure and semistructured data storage, application-level security, robust user directories and built-in messaging services that support human-facing workflows.
Download today (no, no registration required)...

Link: ibm.com: White paper: Discover the six leading-edge capabilities and versatile tools needed to help ensure an accelerated return on investment for an application development environment >

Ed Brill | Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Notes and Domino 8.5  Add/View Comments [31]

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  1. 1  Serdar Basegmez http://lotusnotus.com/en | 1/4/2011 11:40:34 AM

    Ed,

    Excellent News!!! I could not even imagine a better decision than emphasizing its position by using 'Application Development' and 'Product Management' in a business card and put this title on your badge.

  1. 2  Mark Hughes http://hughesconnect.com | 1/4/2011 12:03:01 PM

    Does that make you in charge of or responsible for all things under Notes/Domino?

  1. 3  George Paglia  | 1/4/2011 12:47:56 PM

    Any chance of getting some good development books (text book or othewise) for beginners, intermediate, etc., and possibly getting some of the colleges that use IBM tools (ie, Stony Brook) to actually teach it?

  1. 4  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 1/4/2011 1:03:09 PM

    @2 as of the 1st my team and I are responsible for product management for all things Notes/Domino, along with Symphony, Protector, and LotusLive Notes.

  1. 5  Brett H  | 1/4/2011 1:09:12 PM

    Congrats Ed! I think? (Does this make your job that much harder?) It's cool that you have the whole suite of Lotus products under your belt now though. I'm sure this will help in communications and awareness between the different product silos. Hopefully no more "left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing" kind of situations. Lots of new responsibilities very exciting, congrats again.

    Cheers and Happy New Year!

    Brett

  1. 6  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 1/4/2011 1:15:12 PM

    @5 just to be clear - I don't have the whole suite of Lotus products. Unified Communications, Social, Exceptional Web are all in other product teams. Still we are trying to align at a higher level across the entire collaboration portfolio so your thought is right on.

  1. 7  Henning Heinz  | 1/4/2011 2:06:42 PM

    I believe it when Steve Mills repeats it at Lotusphere. But great success story from Brian Benz with Deloitte.

  1. 8  Brian Labelle  | 1/4/2011 2:30:39 PM

    Ed, while I'm happy with the xPages buzz... Why aren't there any efforts to push Lotus composite application development ?

    Beside's Bob Balfe's blog & the IBM Composite Application Wiki, there isn't much deep diving out there about composite application development.

  1. 9  Mike McP  | 1/4/2011 4:42:20 PM

    Like @8, I cringe when we keep beating the 'xpages' drum without noting the power of existing development methods. Admittedly I haven't RTFA, but the intro gives three nods to xpages and little to everything else Domino offers as a RAD platform. Even the 2010 Lotus Awards nomination for individual required it to be based on something new in 8.x, aka xpages. I haven't checked the 2011 requirements.

    You don't want to plant the seed that says 'you must learn xpages', because that's going to lead to IT managers deciding that they NEED to relearn, which tells them what they're doing now is inferior, which naturally leads them to review all options if they're going to reinvest in training (LAMP, .Net, etc).

    Domino has a mis-marketed, but proud past and present, so why do we even differentiate between Domino and Xpages? Isn't it all Domino development?

  1. 10  Harris Huckabee  | 1/4/2011 5:00:13 PM

    Ed, what makes you stand out is your knack for listening and then doing what you can to make things happen. I hope you take the battle to the competitors and do some bold things. Apps are where its at... people are willing to pay for good apps even in bad times, and Notes is the best RAD appdev environment. I look forward to your leadership. : - )

  1. 11  Erik Brooks  | 1/4/2011 9:14:52 PM

    @Ed - Awesome. It's always been about the apps, and it always will be.

    @7 - That'd be a STRONG point. Hope Mills says it.

    @8/@9 - You guys are missing the point.

    Search the article for:

    "Domino": 13 mentions

    "XPages": 4 mentions

    "Notes": once.

    XPages are where it's at. As each day goes by your need for the "classic" development methods disappears.

    Collapsable sections? WAY more powerful in XPages. Views? WAY more powerful in XPages.

    If you haven't looked at XPages since 8.5.0, you've missed a lot. For example, the view control in 8.5.0 was a piece of garbage. Any "classic" Notes dev would laugh at it. The 8.5.2 control, however, is pretty nice. There's still room for improvement (e.g. the Rich Text editor) but it's all getting better every day. And the fact that there's armies of open source developers (Dojo, CKEditor, etc.) helping out with the various components means IBM can leverage those efforts as well.

    The core RAD component of Notes/Domino is NSF. The fact that you can do this one line of code:

    Customer.FirstName = "Erik"

    ...is *HUGE*. No table work, no crazy indexing work, no refactoring JOIN statements, no "roll-your own" security, replication is handled... NSF is where it's at.

    NSF should be the database platform of choice for 80-85% of all enterprise line-of-business applications, and I'll argue that until the cows come home. "But, it's slow at some things." Wait until you read my upcoming blog post about *Domino* on SSDs. It'll blow your mind.

    Here's the thing, guys: XPages DOESN'T GET RID OF NSF. XPages is entire *generations* ahead of classic Notes/Domino development techniques. Yes, some of the out-of-the-box "classic" Designer stuff is *more* RAD than the XPages equivalent today, but XPages offers a ton of other advantages that more than outweigh the disadvantages in most scenarios. Like, say, running in a browser. And the XPage equivalents of those out-of-the-box widgets are getting better daily.

    Composite Apps? Really? In my eyes they're second to Workplace as a waste of IBM/Lotus development resources.

  1. 12  Ben Poole http://benpoole.com | 1/5/2011 3:11:15 AM

    “…It feels like we've achieved full liftoff for the go-forward story …”

    HOUSE!

    It was good to see this white paper. I don't believe that Mills will ever back it up, but there it is (re #7). I agree with Erik on composite apps: they really strike me as a waste of resource, so I too am happy to see the XPages emphasis.

  1. 13  FirefighterGeek http://www.thenorth.com/apblog | 1/5/2011 3:54:02 AM

    I think it's fantastic to see IBM (or at least a small corner of it) recognize that it already has an excellent product here.

    It's also good to hear that you're taking on the development platform as well, Ed. I may have a few suggestions to toss your way.

  1. 14  Darren Duke http://blog.darrenduke.net | 1/5/2011 4:48:51 AM

    Erik is right. It is all about the NSF. So let's fix the limitations that exist with it, you know the stupid ones like 32K, in that storage system. Then we can go to infinity and beyond.

    A modern interface with 1980's era storage limitations. Anyone else see the issue here? Attracting new developers to the platform (and hoping they can forgo "classic/hacky" Notes in the process) ain't gonna take until you give them a true and simple alternative to SQL and NoSQL. #NoMoreHacks

  1. 15  Peter Presnell http://www.gbs.com | 1/5/2011 5:47:50 AM

    Congratulation to IBM on two fronts. (1) for recognizing what an awesome product it has in Notes/Domino as true RADD tool; and (2)having the foresight to expand Ed's role to include product management for those Lotus Notes RADD tools. Congratulations Ed... AWESOME

  1. 16  FirefighterGeek http://www.thenorth.com/apblog | 1/5/2011 8:52:19 AM

    So, Ed --

    Does this "unifying" the split chains of ownership for designer and client mean we might see progress more quickly as the resolution path for disagreements in direction is now much closer to the design teams than before?

  1. 17  FirefighterGeek http://www.thenorth.com/apblog | 1/5/2011 8:52:54 AM

    damn, I just realized that @16 was an almost Larry Kind level softball.

  1. 18  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 1/5/2011 8:56:38 AM

    @16 I guess we'd have to agree that there are disagreements in direction. Besides, the family has always been together under one executive in product management.

    Obviously I'm going to look at all of the M&C family in a unified way but I am not sure that anything fundamentally changes other than which executive is at the helm of the product management team.

  1. 19  FirefighterGeek http://www.thenorth.com/apblog | 1/5/2011 9:07:43 AM

    @18 - of course there are disagreements. Any two development teams that have common source code are going to disagree. They don't always have to be epic battles to the death (though those do make for better press).

    The truth is, I'm worried about these two products and the amount of legacy "weight" that they've accumulated. On the one hand, I think it's time to make the case that backward compatible may go too far when it includes 20 years of product -- on the other hand, I'm fairly sure I wouldn't agree with what gets dropped in some cases so it's hard to advocate for too hard.

    I'm sure it would make for an interesting discussion at #LS11 if we end up with time to talk that doesn't have too much alcohol or noise --- well, maybe after we get home,by email.

  1. 20  Steve Medure  | 1/5/2011 9:15:45 AM

    I agree with Darren. Bring the NSF out of the 80's.

  1. 21  Carlos Casas http://www.rockteam.com | 1/5/2011 1:15:31 PM

    Congrats, Ed. Best of luck to you and your team in 2011. Looking forward to positive returns for all of us as a result of your efforts in creating value for our clients.

  1. 22  Philipp Koenigs http://www.cedros.com | 1/7/2011 3:24:37 AM

    Good to see this whitepaper. I hope this is just the beginning of a whole new markting campaign targeting on Dominos RADD capabilties. This is long overdue!

    B.t.w: Interesting to see the branding in IM-Green instead of Lotus-Yellow. Whats the reason behind that?

    Phil Koenigs

  1. 23  Pius  | 1/10/2011 12:14:30 PM

    Hi good people. I'm new to Lotus Domino I'm trying to learn this technology as fast as I can. I have set up a small lab at home to practice all I can. I'll be most grateful if anyone could give me a download access to "Lotus foundation Core" so I can practice at home. You know the "Lotus Foundations Start Addons feature". For strange reasons, I'm unable to download a trial version from IBM. It always comes with an error code on a page when I try to download. Thank you so much in advance.

  1. 24  Pius  | 1/10/2011 12:15:14 PM

    Hi good people. I'm new to Lotus Domino I'm trying to learn this technology as fast as I can. I have set up a small lab at home to practice all I can. I'll be most grateful if anyone could give me a download access to "Lotus foundation Core" so I can practice at home. You know the "Lotus Foundations Start Addons feature". For strange reasons, I'm unable to download a trial version from IBM. It always comes with an error code on a page when I try to download. Thank you so much in advance. This is my email address pius1919@gmail.com. Thanks.

  1. 25  Tim Paque  | 1/10/2011 6:31:15 PM

    I would love to see real world comparisons of actual uses in ads.

    Like: Here is Timmy, he can write a fully secure, web capable, fully functioning data/email/workflow/ etc application all by his lonesome in 1 day on this one server.

    Here is Billy, Billy needs these to create the very same application, but he is an MS developer. Based on the same level of experience, Billy took 14 days, to build this application that required 6 different servers.

    Billy sucks...

  1. 26  Luke  | 1/11/2011 3:54:02 AM

    Hi Ed, just a quick suggestion. Please forgive me if what I'm telling is just the same old, same old.

    I see a lot of Sharepoint implementations, which are no-less no-more than the same old TeamRoom concept: sharing documents, with a "nice" web interface.

    Why is the TeamRoom template , with 8.5.2 , still shipping with no use of XPages at all? It could be just one more reason to stay on the Domino platform and don't give up to the licensing and hardware cost of Sharepoint. Where costs and time spent to develop new applications a-la Domino are 10 times fold.

    Congrats for your new assignments :-)

  1. 27  Mark Davids  | 1/11/2011 6:45:46 AM

    @26: I assume that Lotus are keeping TeamRoom old and with minimal features to avoid eating into sales of Connections.

  1. 28  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 1/12/2011 6:04:28 AM

    you assume incorrectly.....

  1. 29  Mark Davids  | 1/12/2011 7:47:57 AM

    I'd be delighted to be proved wrong!

    We're a small company and can't justify the extra cost/resources of connections, but the dated look of teamrooms means that users don't like them.

  1. 30  Rob Novak http://www.LotusRockStar.com | 1/12/2011 11:07:26 AM

    @Mark - proven wrong...details, oh I don't know, about 2.5 weeks?