In an earlier post, I responded to the community complaint of Lotus Domino falling behind other web platforms, and that nobody is fixing it. My opinions and comments on the topic remain unchanged. Still, I would also like to approach the subject from another angle. I've made blunt remarks about what's wrong with Lotus Notes and Domino, so it is only fair to also mention the good parts. I will try to do this by outlining things we take for granted in Lotus Notes and Domino, that are much harder to implement outside Domino.

Authentication is a given in Domino. It occurs using your Notes id file or a web login. You don't need to do anything, except setting some ACL properties. In other platforms, authentication is also relatively simple, but often does require custom work, especially for LDAP-based SSO solutions. As for authorization, Notes has Access Control Lists (ACLs), that require no coding. I have yet to find a similar functionality in the other platforms, Active Directory may come close, but not really. My experience tells you that you will often end up maintaining users in a custom table, along with custom logic to maintain them.

Readers and author fields? It's Notes only. Let's not even go into encryption and signing.

Offline access

Taking an application and all its data offline through a common interface is a joy in Lotus Notes. It is either impossible or incredibly hard in the other platforms. .Net does seem to have some sort of a hybrid desktop application that works both offline and online, but it doesn't come close to true replication.

Document-based development

Outside Domino, you will probably rely on a relational database to store your data. Dynamically adding fields to a record is not an option in such a database, as it relies on a strict data scheme. There are ways to model your relational database around this, but again, this is much harder to accomplish than in Notes. A relational database also has no response mechanism like Notes has. Storing rich text data and attachments in a relational database is possible, and not very hard, but still harder than in Domino.

Email

Notes is well integrated into email. It allows for rich emails that include markup and doclinks without too much trouble. In the other platforms, you will probably use SMTP mail along with MIME trickery to get some decent-looking mails send out. Notes allows this level of control as well, especially if the receiver is a non-Notes email user. Still, it feels much easier in Notes, due to its rich email API.

Workflow

A bit of a tricky subject, but to me building a workflow application feels easy in Notes. I think because it requires pretty much all of the features mentioned in this post, features at which Notes has a clear advantage. The combination of them all makes Notes a productive platform to build workflow applications in. I know there are various workflow frameworks in the other platforms available, I currently lack the knowledge to make a fair comparison here, but I expect things to be harder outside Domino again.

(Scheduled) agents

Scheduled agents are contained and managed in the Domino environment as an integrated experience. Outside Domino, you would use cronjobs or Windows services at the OS level, not the middleware level. The Domino solution is much easier to manage and inspect, and also a lot more powerful. You can run agents from different events, not just a time interval.

Mail-in databases.

I have to admit, I have never tried this outside Domino and would not know where to start. In Domino it is easy.

Replication

Yes, we already discussed the advantage of offline access. But replication is a whole lot more. It enables for a distributed server-side applications where code and data is synchronized seamlessly, without extra effort. Not impossible outside Domino, but definitely not this intuitive.

Conclusion

I still consider Lotus Notes and Domino a winner in all the aspects described above, regardless of its limited web engine. In fact, it is the powerful features described above that caused my initial "bashing" article. Notes is too good to be missing out on the web. Please take note that this article does not try to bash the other platforms, I am simply stating that everything is possible in the major platforms, but some things are harder outside Domino.

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