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LotusNotes

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Re: LotusNotes

#91

Post by tracker1 »

acomjean wrote: post #50

I ended up at IBM around the turn of the century. They bought Lotus and I was brought on to write lotus notes applications. The article asks “what is notes”. For applications it’s a nosql database with a gui front end. You can make custom applications and share with your team easily. Lotusscript bound it together. We ported a green screen tracking software (year 2000 was approaching) to Notes and had a bunch of custo…

Hard to imagine a place adopting Notes and just using the email... email was always kind of a shortcoming in the box. It was there, but wasn't very good imo. I think that Outlook was pretty great up until they started the cloud editions backing M365... I understand why they've changed it how they have, I just think it was better UX for most people before, even if it didn't scale well.

Re: LotusNotes

#92

Post by tracker1 »

baggachipz wrote: post #72

My first dev job was a Notes developer. It really was an amazing piece of tech in hindsight. IMO their real folly was chasing the web trend; at its heart it was a groupware product, and they tried to make it be too many things to everybody. I spent most of my time trying to wrestle it into doing things it wasn't meant to do. It got me extremely proficient with LotusScript which led to other opportunities (Hello ASP!)…

For that matter, had they invested in a web plugin that treated domino as a thin client server, they may also still be around today. Though load balancing would probably take a bit more work.

Re: LotusNotes

#93

Post by tracker1 »

_nhh wrote: post #55

I joined a company in 2025 an since then I am tasked with porting all Lotus Notes databases to the web (spa+restapi). Funny to see all the comments living in the past as its so present to me.

I haven't even seen Notes in the wild since around 2008 or so...

Re: LotusNotes

#94

Post by nradov »

andrewstuart wrote: post #9
GMoromisato wrote: post #3

I was a developer at Iris Associates--I worked on versions 2 through 4. For version 3 I stuck in an easter egg in the About box. A certain combination of keys would produce a Monty-Python-like cut-out of Ray Ozzie's head and the names of the developers would fly out of his mouth. [This was when the software world was young and innocent and developers were trusted far beyond what they probably should have been.] Lotus…

There were many reasons Notes died. It was very hard to get data in and out it had almost no capability for data import/export. Internet email killed Notes early advantage as one of the first email systems. It was a very closed environment hard to connect or program outside its own sandbox. Sharepoint was a full on assault by Microsoft on the groupware category and its enormous success was at the expense of Notes. Th…

It wasn't that hard to get data out. IBM released a native Windows ODBC driver for Domino databases. Since the underlying database was non-relational you couldn't really use it for SQL queries with complex joins but for basic data export tasks it worked fine.

Re: LotusNotes

#96

Post by tracker1 »

cake-rusk wrote: post #37
cake-rusk wrote: post #6

It was bad. There was a dedicated site called lotusnotessucks.com or something like that. It does not exist anymore but here is an article about it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/feb/09/guardianw...

Here's a quote from the article. Hopefully this helps the people with rose tinted glasses get some perspective... >Lotus Notes is used by millions of people, but almost all of them seem to hate it. How can a program be so bad, yet thrive?

VB6? I mean, you could do some great things with it, and it was pretty easy to do things with. That said, so many people doing things with it didn't really know what they were doing, had no UX understanding and just created slop.

I think half the issues people have with AI today are simply because AI has seen just as much slop in the real world as it has "good, clear code."

Re: LotusNotes

#97

Post by WillAdams »

pscanf wrote: post #79
WillAdams wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One noted science fiction author, C.J. Cherryh, notes, “It is perfectly okay to write garbage --- as long as you edit brilliantly.”[1] --- for a while I've been wondering if this adage was applicable to Vibe-coding, and your methodology would seem to be a reasonable approach/response to get the benefits of this and to shield against the detriments, and to ensure that a human developer understands the code before comm…

> your methodology would seem to be a reasonable approach/response to get the benefits of this and to shield against the detriments If you're referring to the sandboxing / isolation of each app, I agree. Plus, the user can change the app quite easily, so if when they spot a bug, they can tell the agent to fix it (and cross their fingers!). > ensure that a human developer understands the code before committing Just to…

I was referring more to your commentary/explanation about it not being a Vibe-coded app.

Yeah, I can see that one is on their own recognizance when letting an LLM run unsupervised.

Re: LotusNotes

#98

Post by andrewstuart »

nradov wrote: post #94
andrewstuart wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were many reasons Notes died. It was very hard to get data in and out it had almost no capability for data import/export. Internet email killed Notes early advantage as one of the first email systems. It was a very closed environment hard to connect or program outside its own sandbox. Sharepoint was a full on assault by Microsoft on the groupware category and its enormous success was at the expense of Notes. Th…

It wasn't that hard to get data out. IBM released a native Windows ODBC driver for Domino databases. Since the underlying database was non-relational you couldn't really use it for SQL queries with complex joins but for basic data export tasks it worked fine.

I suppose I only really use Notes pre IBM.

Re: LotusNotes

#99

Post by kwanbix »

vsajip wrote: post #45

In my experience working with Notes over many years, it was a neat architecture let down by client UI that did not meet the expectations of users who also used, for example, MS Office apps. Often, they were cosmetic things. But Notes enabled workflow applications like email on steroids; Microsoft leveraged all it could to displace Notes with Exchange and SharePoint, both IMO technically not as good as Notes in many a…

I agree with everything but the UI part. I think it was on par with Office. I used both at the same time. This is if you are compering Outlook, the email client, with the email app in Lotus Notes. As Lotus Notes was much more than email client. I was just the other day talking about Lotus Notes and Outlook. Lotus Notes had 3 different ways to look for info, the most powerfull one being indexing the database. My friend was praising how good Notes search was vs Outlook that never seem to find anything.

Lotus Notes Supported Formulas, LotusScript and Java.

Re: LotusNotes

#100

Post by noAnswer »

nradov wrote: post #5
GMoromisato wrote: post #3

I was a developer at Iris Associates--I worked on versions 2 through 4. For version 3 I stuck in an easter egg in the About box. A certain combination of keys would produce a Monty-Python-like cut-out of Ray Ozzie's head and the names of the developers would fly out of his mouth. [This was when the software world was young and innocent and developers were trusted far beyond what they probably should have been.] Lotus…

Lotus Notes as a thick client application was a dead end but the Domino server could have lived on as a back end database for web applications, if IBM had any vision. The core technology of a fast, secure NoSQL document database with multi-master replication actually worked really well (at least after they fixed the index corruption race condition bug that I found). But it had a weird stupid limit of (I think) 64GB p…

For the longest time SharePoint's central volume could only go up to 4GB. Going above required to combine multiple volumes.

So having a limit of 64GB per file doesn't sound so bad.

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