But that is not the important point when deciding whether to use it, because it is absolutely not a viable platform from the "Can you find a team to actually code on this platform?" perspective.
By the time I had finished with that last gig, I told everyone the same thing: That I personally knew both Domino and modern web frameworks and could blend them together to have a modern front-end on that back-end. But I figure there are a couple dozen people in the world who know both sides well enough to do so, because the industry moved on. The talent moved on. Or retired. Most of my work post-2009 was decommission projects. At the same time, new frameworks have come to fruition since the 90s, so all the special features Domino has baked in just aren't that unique anymore. There are also almost no jobs in it, so no reason for people to learn it.
At the end of the day, you cannot run a company on a tech stack where there is no talent pool.
This is also why I say there are few people who know Domino well enough to run it today - even in its heydey there was some mad science to do large apps on it, knowing not only all the quirks but how to work around them.
[1]: https://ds_infolib.hcltechsw.com/ldd/nd85forum.nsf/DateAllFl...
IBM didn't provide any tools for horizontal sharding either. We had to roll our own, which was a huge expense and made every part of the application far more complex. And it actually made reliability worse; because displaying incomplete data was not acceptable to customers, if any one database got corrupted then everything failed.
Domino runs on Lotuscript.. which is is ecmascript..
And ecmascript is better known as JavaScript.
OS/2 is still made, you can find out more about it here: https://www.arcanoae.com/about/
IBM's latest updates on Domino: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/dsm?topic=lotus-domino It looks like Domino is still supported.
I wrote apps in the 1990s using ASP and VBScript and Javascript and ActiveX. We didn't use Domino.
Reading through the article, it seems like that theory was proven out and along with the awful UI that Notes was, it led to many IBM shops adopting Exchange/Outlook and later SharePoint.
Something odd about Lotus Notes/Domino, and part of the reason for its awful UI, is that everything is a database (the NSF mentioned in the article). All UI is a view on that database. Viewing an email? That's just view on a item in the database. Sending an email? That's just adding a row into the 'Outbox' table. The entire product was built with this paradigm at the center of it all.
No tables and no rows in Notes. Composing an email would create a new document using the "Mail" form; clicking the "Send" button would run a shockingly confusing script that would cause the document to render in the style of a sent email; some awful LotusScript "Agent," the details of which I've long forgotten, would soon thereafter urge the Domino MTA to send mail based on its apprehension of the new document in your mailbox database.
Oh that's right. You're now giving me PTSD from all this Notes internals knowledge that was hidden away in my brain.
There used to be a joke that went round that particular office, there are exactly two people who LOVE Lotus: The boss who signed off on it (cos it made them look good), and the person who had to implement it (cos moneymoneymoney).
Everyone else went "Uggghhh, Lotus Notes."
What happened on December 13, 2024? [1]
I spent a good portion of my time late nineties working with Lotus Notes/Domino. I even had all the certifications (Principal CLP Application Developer, Principal CLP System Administrator). (And I worked on migrations from OfficeVision and from cc:Mail.)
A few things I remember really liking, from both a development and administration perspective:
- trivial to set up a second or third server, and have data automatically replicate between them
- super-easy to create CRUD apps for custom business processes, without using any 'code' except formulae that were as simple as spreadsheet formulae
- ability to add extra functionality with a language very similar to Visual Basic
And a few things that were annoying:
- because email was just another Notes application, it wasn't as good as things made just for email (like Outlook or Eudora)
- many people thought 'views' were folders, and that if an email existed in two places that meant two copies, and that they could delete one of them
- 'replication or save conflict' (https://help.hcl-software.com/dom_designer/14.5.0/basic/H_AB...)
Several times I sat with a user at their desk, and developed the first version of a CRUD app for them in real time, whilst we were still discussing the requirements.
Thunderbird user here. I wish you hadn't said that. I'll be forever missing this now :(
Having just one Big Ol' Container of Email and making views on that, based on whatever properties/tags like which project it's for, which customer, whether it's marked as spam by the system or by you, a keyword match, or sorting it higher if I'm in To instead of CC... yes please! Am I picturing right how this worked?
I've always been slightly confused why they insisted on selling it as a mediocre email client rather than a quite fantastic RAD tool.
This is exactly my thought.
Perhaps Attio or Google AppSheet?
I used Designer to improve a bit the UI of the e-mail app of Notes. In general I have positive thoughts for both Domino and Notes, as e-mail server & client. Nevertheless the majority of colleagues complained, mostly due to Notes being different from Outlook I think.
Yet, one day, a fellow colleague, a young beautiful woman (marketing, not an IT geek or something), came in IT office to announce us her resignation. Before leaving, she asked if it's possible to give her the Notes installer to install it on her PC at home. She disliked Outlook & Outlook express and really liked Notes :) (v5 at that time if I recall well). We were all stunned and of course gave her the installer and a guide on how to setup her yahoo or hotmail using pop3 or imap.
I do gravely miss the ability to actually have the bits, and will take any steps I can to grab an offline installer if offered
Specifically, say there is an existing app with many users and which is full of data (say travel planning app) and you need to add a feature to it, which maybe takes a week of dev time.
- Do you work in prod and hope you don't break the existing functionality for users? Maybe even copy all forms ("new-request" -> "new-request2") so people don't see WIP... or maybe do all the work during nights?
- Or do you make a copy of that NSF file to your computer and develop on it? What if it has gigabytes of data, or if it has private data (like that HR database)? What do you do when you done - can you somehow merge code from one NSF file to another but leave data intact?
- Or is this something else? Maybe single-file was optional and big databases were manager separately, or there is some other simple option I am overlooking...
The problem was that the NTF was a big binary file. You couldn't really do effective team development with branching and merging of source code. We worked out some manual processes for copying and pasting pieces around to prevent conflicts, but it was a huge mess. IBM never really understood or prioritized the needs of Domino developers.
You have migration scripts, and also have local copies, or team specific schemas, with dummy data for development purposes.
Delivery into production usually done in multiple steps, introducing the new feature, deprecating the old one, and eventually removing the old code/tables in another deployment cycle after the new one proves itself working without issues.
Before IBM forced changes on Notes I would say it was a very nice environment. But IBM, maybe customers and maybe others wanted it to work like cc mail (Is that was it was called?). The changes they made to me ruined the environment.
I wonder how Domino is doing, I hope it can continue being used by some people.
I think that some of the changes in Notes 4 were good to make it more usable inside a large organization, but many things like adding a web server and IIRC some sort of Java subsystem? turned it into bloatware. And some of the changes were prompted by IBM’s disastrous internal rollout of Notes, which had more to do with IbM internal messaging culture and less to do with any flaws in Notes.
The additional of web server features was well intentioned but never worked correctly. IBM had this fantasy that developers could build an application once, then deploy it automatically to both Lotus Notes native thick clients and web browsers. Of course, this completely fell apart for anything but the most trivial applications. It also created a lot of market confusion because it competed with IBM's own WebSphere Application Server product.
* a USENET type dB
* News feeds
* classifieds
* a form of document routing with approval signatures
* many other cool databases
It was a whole new way of doing things, but IBM only pushed its email portion and eventually ruined the product.
V4 was good, but I liked v3 better. It never reached its potential :(
They then kept trying to re-invent web development to be more tightly integrated, and it all went badly. R5 came out in 1999, and I rejected pretty much all their new front-end features after that point, but delivered a couple decades of web-based apps just using Domino as a back-end stack.
The year that IBM bought Lotus, they decided to create a mini-website about it for their annual shareholder's meeting. The plan was to host the site on Lotus Notes Domino as a way of showing the value of the acquisition.
Something about this was last minute, but I can't remember what it was: Either the whole thing was a rush job because the merger has just happened, or the decision to use Domino to host the site was. I'm not sure which.
IBM had hired a boutique firm in Atlanta to design and lay out the web pages with all the bells and whistles: Slick graphics, gif-animations, JavaScript interactivity, etc. (this was mid-1990s when flashing text was a big deal). But, of course, they had no Domino experience.
At the time, I was a 20-something wiz kid working at my first job after I dropped out of college for a Lotus Notes consulting firm in Atlanta, with contracts at Bell South, Coca-Cola, IBM and other big names. I had been the first one in the company to get into the web in general, and then combined that with my Lotus Notes experience to become the Domino expert.
When the design firm reached out to my company for help getting the website working on Domino, I was the (only) one to send over to help.
So I spent a few days at their hip downtown loft/office working on a Notes database that would host the site. This involved converting their ordinary web pages into something that would work in Domino, which had it's own way of storing templates and displaying pages based on the underlaying Notes database. I'd run into an issue and then get with the designers to work around some limitation or another. But by Friday we had it working and looking great. They sent the database and other files up to IBM where they would then get it up and running on their public web servers.
Around 5pm that Sunday, I get a call from my boss. The design firm had called in a panic: IBM couldn't get Domino working. They could see the site locally on the same machine, but they couldn't access it publicly. I needed to help their server team fix it. In New York. Tomorrow. (Me? Didn't IBM own Lotus?)
He tells me that IBM is sending a car to come around and pick me up in 30 minutes, to get me to the airport where I'll fly to New York. Another car will pick me up and drive me to Armonk, where I'll check into a hotel, and then Monday morning I was to go into IBM early and help them get the site working, as the shareholders meeting had started.
IBM wasn't messing around. They used black car service with driver, flew me First/Business class, booked me into a nice hotel, the whole deal.
So I arrive at like 6 am the next morning and am met with open arms by someone running their server farm who explains everything they've done so far. He then plops me down in a corner of a giant server room, in front of a machine running AIX, with a Unix version of Notes and a terminal open to the machine running the Apache proxy to their public servers.
I had never seen, let alone used, a Unix box in my life up to that point, and knew nothing about Apache. I wasn't even sure what a "proxy" server did. I remember just sitting there for a minute, wide-eyed - looking at the three-button mouse like it was an alien artifact, and boggled by the GUI (CDE? Motif?) which was also from Mars. I was the opposite of that girl in Jurassic Park. "It's a Unix system! I have no idea what to do!"
Thankfully the Notes interface was the same on all platforms, so I had an anchor point to start from. Besides the fact that it took me a minute to figure out how to scroll (middle mouse button), I was in my element there.
The problem, it turned out, was a simple configuration setting (thank all that is holy) which I recognized immediately. It took me longer to figure out the mouse button thing. So like the proverbial plumber story, I opened my toolbox, took out a small ball peen hammer, tapped the configuration options, and the site popped up online.
Hooray!
Smiles all around! Handshakes were given, backs were slapped, jobs were saved. I was out of there by 8 am and on a plane back to Atlanta a couple after that, the conquerering hero.
So there's my Domino story. 30 years later it's still amusing to me.
That squares with my mental model (and, related to that, my guess half-way through the story was that it was erroneously listening on 127.0.0.1 instead of 0.0.0.0). I also love the plumber analogy. I similarly enjoy the "mechanic's rates": $1 to fix it, $10 if you watch, $100 if you help
I loved the commercial and get nostalgic watching it now.
At a company I worked for, an intern mangled a bit of lotusscript into an unintentional virus that forwarded the entire contents of his inbox to every email address in the company, causing a reply storm that took a week to recover from.
From then on we called it Locust — a plague.
His reaction was, "Oh, shit." I don't know who he talked to, or if it was just a coincidence, but Execution Control Lists came out really quick on the next version.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250407003816/http://www.moohar...