In my thirty-something year career as an engineer I have designed hardware and software using many tools. For a long time I searched for the magic bullet software system that would let me create database-backed applications with ease and grace.
Before the Internet ... even before Windows ... I tried dBase, FoxPro, Clarion, Framework, DataFlex and others with varying degrees of success. At some point my quest faded into the background.
When the Internet hit me between the eyes I'd taken a job that forced me to use Lotus Notes. Oh how I hated Notes. Well, to make a long story short (too late?) Notes evolved into Notes/Domino and I evolved into writing software for the web.
At some point I realized that Notes/Domino WAS the silver bullet I had been seeking earlier in my career. I realized that I can do anything in Notes/Domino that I can do with any other system. And, as a single vendor solution, it's well integrated from top to bottom. If you do things the Notes-way, everything is very easy. But, if you want to do things just the way you want, Notes/Domino doesn't stop you.
A good example is your blog. Yes, the Notes-way is to add "?EditDocument" on the end of the URL and you edit using the same form that displayed the data. But there's no reason you can't create a different form and let a QuerySave agent process the data and update the document item values on any document in the database.
In any other system like .Net, you're going to have to write that code anyway so the QuerySave agent is the same to me. Now with XPages there are other options as well. (Don't ask me what they are quite yet. I don't grok XPages yet ... but I will.)
I have found the Notes/Domino system to be the easiest system for the kind of systems I generally create. It's also the easiest system to let me administer and modify a production system without disturbing the users.
The other attribute of Notes/Domino I love is the most granular and automatable security model I've seen bar none. I use reader fields and author fields in most every design and I automate the update of these fields, group creation and maintenance and the updating of the ACL.
The system I think comes closest to matching Notes/Domino for the kind of systems I create is Plone.
I'm not saying you shouldn't explore other alternatives. Heck, I spend most of my days writing Perl 5 and Ruby in my current non-web work. I'm just saying that, in the end, you may come to appreciate Notes/Domino even more.
Relational data bases are great but changing the schema and then migrating the data, at least when I was doing that, was painful. This means you've got to do a better job of designing up front to avoid the pain. If you have to change the schema on a production system you will likely have to shut the system down. In Notes I change make those kind of change all the time and the users are not affected ... if I do it right.
Well, this has gotten way too long. I guess I should have tweeted it instead.
In my thirty-something year career as an engineer I have designed hardware and software using many tools. For a long time I searched for the magic bullet software system that would let me create database-backed applications with ease and grace.
Before the Internet ... even before Windows ... I tried dBase, FoxPro, Clarion, Framework, DataFlex and others with varying degrees of success. At some point my quest faded into the background.
When the Internet hit me between the eyes I'd taken a job that forced me to use Lotus Notes. Oh how I hated Notes. Well, to make a long story short (too late?) Notes evolved into Notes/Domino and I evolved into writing software for the web.
At some point I realized that Notes/Domino WAS the silver bullet I had been seeking earlier in my career. I realized that I can do anything in Notes/Domino that I can do with any other system. And, as a single vendor solution, it's well integrated from top to bottom. If you do things the Notes-way, everything is very easy. But, if you want to do things just the way you want, Notes/Domino doesn't stop you.
A good example is your blog. Yes, the Notes-way is to add "?EditDocument" on the end of the URL and you edit using the same form that displayed the data. But there's no reason you can't create a different form and let a QuerySave agent process the data and update the document item values on any document in the database.
In any other system like .Net, you're going to have to write that code anyway so the QuerySave agent is the same to me. Now with XPages there are other options as well. (Don't ask me what they are quite yet. I don't grok XPages yet ... but I will.)
I have found the Notes/Domino system to be the easiest system for the kind of systems I generally create. It's also the easiest system to let me administer and modify a production system without disturbing the users.
The other attribute of Notes/Domino I love is the most granular and automatable security model I've seen bar none. I use reader fields and author fields in most every design and I automate the update of these fields, group creation and maintenance and the updating of the ACL.
The system I think comes closest to matching Notes/Domino for the kind of systems I create is Plone.
I'm not saying you shouldn't explore other alternatives. Heck, I spend most of my days writing Perl 5 and Ruby in my current non-web work. I'm just saying that, in the end, you may come to appreciate Notes/Domino even more.
Relational data bases are great but changing the schema and then migrating the data, at least when I was doing that, was painful. This means you've got to do a better job of designing up front to avoid the pain. If you have to change the schema on a production system you will likely have to shut the system down. In Notes I change make those kind of change all the time and the users are not affected ... if I do it right.
Well, this has gotten way too long. I guess I should have tweeted it instead.