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SOA v. Notes and Domino Via Adam Gaffin, here's an essay that gets to the heart of the relative strength of Notes and Domino versus service=oriented archtectures. There's a bit of back-handed complimenting thrown in, but that's really beside the point. Here we have the CEO of a firm that specializes in the architectures and methods that are considered "mainstream" and "enterprise class" admiitting, perhaps a little grudgingly, that RAD with Notes and Domino works: Generally speaking, we considered the Notes team to be creating 'Disposable Applications'. The people were cheap, the licensing was cheap enough, and the throughput was high. We allowed them to knock out small applications - and they did - they churned through them. Then an interesting thing happened... our users started telling us that they wanted the new application to be done in Notes (not PowerBuilder). "What? You want it in Notes??? Those are the idiot programmers that we couldn't fire." I thought to myself.
An interesting dynamic had occurred. Our users realized a handful of things: 1. The Notes team delivered applications faster than the PowerBuilder team.
2. The Notes team didn't make the users feel like technical idiots; thus they became friends with the team.
3. On occasion, the users would make small changes to the Notes applications themselves.
4. The users realized that in addition to collecting, storing and retrieving data, virtually all business processes involve workflow and collaboration. In fact, the collaboration was often more important than the structured data.
I have the unique opportunity of seeing lots of service oriented offerings. Virtually all of them are of the 'PowerBuilder' classification. Most of them start off by integrating into Eclipse or Visual Studio. Ok - with this as a starting point you have already determined that you aren't a disposable application. The next thing that I see is that vendors expect people to understand XML Schema. This again, precludes the disposable community. Should they know XSLT? Nope. BPEL? Hell no. XQuery? Uh... No. Of course, there's a place for all that mainstream service-oriented, enterprise class stuff, too. We in the Notes and Domino community have known that all along, too. That's where we always sent the idiot programmers that we couldn't fire, which worked out very well because they would disappear into two-year projects that were obsolete before they were released, so the fact that they couldn't design anything that met real user requirements would end up moot. And they'd be out of our way, so we could be more productive. ;-)
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