Monday, November 13, 2017

When your Tool is a Hammer, Everything is a Nail, Transformation of Domino - Part 2

The recent announcement by IBM to continue the development and support for the IBM Domino platform indefinitely was great timing for part 2 of this series. This series is about the direction that we are taking Domino. This journey has taken more than five years with many different designs and experiments to get to where we are in our iPhora technology. You can find Part 1 of this series here

There are many tools and solutions out there from many vendors for "Modernizing" a Notes application. But what does that really mean?  In most cases, that means replacing the Notes application interface with a Web interface and making a better UI experience for the user.

But for us application modernization is not just about the front-end but also but how the data is collected, managed, stored and processed. How it integrates with outside third-party services. Most Domino application modernization leaves the data untouched in the same structure. XPages mimics the Notes application environment for a Web client versus a Notes client. This approach allows data to remain in place as it was defined.  But as we all know, it also leaves a lot of useless code, views and wasted resources. 

We wanted a defined framework, that allowed us to create applications more consistent with how the majority of modern Web applications are built but at the same time utilize the best parts of Domino. We are not just interested in "Modernizing a current Notes/Domino application" but building new enterprise applications that utilizes the key advantages that Domino uniquely has.  Before we go any further lets look at what a Web server environment normally consist of. It may include:
  • Web server
  • Identity/Authenication server
  • Load balancer
  • Cluster manager
  • Mail server ( for notifications )
  • API server
  • Integration server
  • Application server
  • Database server
One of the best things about IBM Domino is that all these different type of server components that you need is all bundled into one single server package. This is great for many, but it is also its Achilles heel. This tight integration also creates problems. Any changes to the design of one these server components require changes in the other server components. As a result, each of the server components may not be optimal. That means that IBM Domino is a jack of all trades but not the best of anything. For many that is more than enough. However, for scalability, extensibility and future competitiveness this is bad. If IBM Domino is to be competitive, you need to reevaluate the approach on how applications are built on Domino, but at the same time understand how to utilize the best features found in Domino but not in other platforms.  

Majority of Notes applications have a one to one database relationship with each having different views,  forms and etc. Over time they all have different design approaches. Some developers break out the application to multiple databases some not. The design varies from application to application. A typical Domino application has all the business logic and data wrapped into a single database regardless of whether you are using XPages, traditional Web application, Notes Application, and whether we are using REST API with JavaScript or generating the Web application using XPages. 

We wanted to separate out the different server components and depending on our need replace those components will newer components that may utilize different technologies not found currently in Domino. This would allow us to Dockerize Domino easier in the future. By breaking up the server components, we can now look into replacing these components with other technologies that have better performance. For example, Nginx as a Web server has much higher performance than what Domino could ever be, the API server could be replaced with a form of Node/Loopback.io.

So in a typical iPhora installation there is a fix number of designated Domino databases each serving as an individual server component that makes up the iPhora server.  A base installation includes:
  • Web Server (Generates the UI interface) 
  • API server ( generates all the RESTFul APIs)
  • Database server (JSON-based data store)
  • File Database Manager (Manages all the files stored on the installation)
  • Application server (contains all the business logic)
  • Identity Server ( contains all the profiles and users info and works with the Domino Directory)
So regardless of the type of application or how many applications you have, you have the same number of databases, unless you exceed the limits of a Domino database which we have not encountered yet. So an application is no longer represented as a single database, but a collection of business logic, UI components, and APIs. It may seem to be a waste initially, but as you build more and more applications, you do not need to allocate more and more databases.  The individual databases collectively provides the framework for your application to draw from. Our typical application is now a series of MVC views, JavaScript/CSS files, additional APIs, if needed, and business logic files.  All applications must follow a strict design pattern for both front-end and back-end which also allow us to have different developers working on the front-end and the back-end.

Security is our top priority not shear speed like other platforms. Regardless of who you are, users only have read access to the Web server database and the API database when access any application. All the rest of the databases, users have no access include administrators. CRUD is a definite NO NO. Users regardless whether they are only readers or administrators should NEVER have direct access to the data. Strict access control of data is done through a gateway with low level administration only done using our Notes-based client application.

One of our biggest challenges was transforming the Notes document database into a JSON-based data store similarity found in MongoDB or CouchDB. We used CouchDB as our design model, but discovered that we needed our own approach. We will discuss this is part 3.










Friday, November 3, 2017

Domino X and Beyond, What Does this Mean?

On October 25, 2017, IBM announced their strategic partnership with HCL with Domino, Sametime, Traveler, Verse and other products. As many have blogged and tweeted, IBM is turning over the development of these products for the forseeable future to HCL. Also, Ed Brill announced that IBM will be releasing Domino X in 2018 and #Domino2025 Jam to help determine the future of the Domino technology. I am not going to dwell on the details. You can find it yourself.  I am going to discuss what this means for Phora Group and myself.

There are many naysayers who have stated that this announcement is too late. I would say it is NEVER too late.

So what does this announcement mean for Phora Group and myself. Am I super excited, NO.  Am I happy, YES. Was the moving of development to HCL surprising, NO. And, it will not surprise me if the relationship with HCL go beyond just development, think Lenovo. We have been partners with IBM/Lotus for a very long time, and know that things just does not move fast at IBM. With Domino development moving to HCL, hopefully will move faster. However, it is really not about the technology but about the marketing and the application of the technology and this is where IBM's competitor have excelled at. With movement to hosting and the cloud, all users see is the application that they are using. Users does not know anything about the technology nor they care. We are in the world where someone throws up a cool application in the cloud, everyone starts using it and assumed it is trust worthy with their information being safe without any second thoughts until a breach. Users see marketing. So it is all about marketing and the applications that are available on the platform that will drive the future of Domino. No longer can you stay in a Business to Business mode. Regardless of what you are doing you are in the Business to Consumer mode.

Many people talk about Domino being a legacy technology. If that was the case, why are so many companies trying to duplicate its architecture including MongoDB, Couchbase, and SharePoint.  Some say that Domino do not use "modern techniques.  Well that depends on the development approach and techniques. Yes, there are features that I would like to see built into Domino. However, the flexibility of Domino allows you to use modern techniques not just for the front-end but the back-end. If you push old techniques as the way to do things, you get applications that are not modern. In our iPhora products, we have a modern JavaScript MVC front-end with a modern secure JSON-based datastore and architecture. And in our opinion of course being biased, superior to other solutions out there. It is fast and scalable. It allows us to integrate with other best of breed enterprise solutions. I will talk about that in part 2 is my current blog series next week.

Here is my technology wish list for the future of Domino:

  • 2-factor authentication, a must have.
  • Create Node C++ add-on integration into the Domino core C API.
  • Strip the Notes client down to the C API core (Notes Core) and integrate Node C++ API to allow it to connect to Electron and others front end tools.
  • Make sure the Notes Core runs on Linux.
  • Make the existing Notes Mail client and Notes application client add-ons to the Notes Core, this allows existing Notes Mail and application to continue working
  • No matter what, keep replication as part of the Notes Core, this is one of the most powerful features of Notes and Domino
  • Create a Verse add-on to the Notes Core so that we have true offline capabilities with Verse
  • Get rid of Eclipse and do not make it an option.
  • Strip Domino to the core components and let developers determine what components they want to use (Domino Core).
  • Make Java an optional add-on to the Domino Core so when new versions of Java comes along it is not a major operation to upgrade it and if you do not want Java, you do not have to install it.
  • Keep LotusScript, it has better security and control along with scheduled agents.
  • Remove Websphere from Sametime and bring it back to a Domino/Node solution.
  • Create a Domino Designer as an add-on to other development tools like Microsoft Visual Studio
  • Get rid of sorted views (it slows things down and not needed)

I figure that I will be working with Domino even when I am in my 70s.  It is the most unappreciated technology that I know of.  It is not the cool kid on the block, but it is a technology that I know is secure, scalable, flexible and reliable and yes it is modern.  It just need more love.

With this announcement, we can say we have NO plans to migrate off the Domino technology.


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Our presentation for CollabSphere 2022. Learn how to quickly add workflow automation into Notes/Nomad applications using No-code tools that ...