XML: a fortuitous discovery
The popularity of the Internet was exploding at the time, the dot-com revolution was just about to move into hyper acceleration, and I was desperately trying to catch up on a flurry of new and revolutionary Internet technologies that had been recently released. I spent weeks reading everything I could on the Microsoft site and walking down never-ending trails of hyperlinks introducing me to all sorts of weird and wonderful standards, concepts, and technologies. With each new technology, I would try to understand the essential essence of that technology, what it was for, how it worked, and what it could be applied to. I'd then move on to the next and repeat the learning process.

One of these technologies caught my eye as a potential solution to my Content Management System architecture problem: XML. XML wasn't widely recognized or understood at the time, and I still didn't quite know what it did. So I looked into it in depth, and the more I read, the more interested I became. As far as I could tell, XML appeared to solve the Holy Grail of problems with Lotus Domino: interoperability. I couldn't quite believe what I was reading as I came to understand more about XML. Could it really be this easy? XML appeared to allow you to make up text based data structures almost willy-nilly and then was able to read them straight into other computer systems using HTTP, the text transport protocol of the Internet. It seemed too good to be true, and I kept looking for the gotcha that would blow the whole thing apart.

Remember that this is 1998, and we're talking about Lotus Domino 4.6. Unlike later versions, Lotus Domino 4.6 had no XML at all built in.

My head spun with excitement. If XML was what it appeared to be, then this would solve my architecture problem! By using XML, I could get complete and total separation of the content management and administration from the content display.

I asked the development team to carry out some tests, and to my excitement it turned out that XML fit the bill perfectly. Well, not quite perfectly. There was a major issue that came up, but how we fixed it is another story.

The solution fell into place, and the architecture of the system came together rapidly after that.

We would build a system in which the content management and administration lived in a single Lotus Domino database, with the content being published out in XML format.

Lotus Domino and Microsoft IIS/ASP: strange bedfellows
The architecture of my Content Management System was coming together, but there was one major gap. How was I going to render the XML into finished HTML pages?

The answer to this was fairly simple, but it was hard for a lot of people to get their heads around at the time. I decided that we would read the XML out of Domino into a Microsoft IIS/ASP server, and the Microsoft server would build the finished HTML. Huh? The Microsoft server will talk directly to the Lotus server? Strange.

I decided to do it this way for a variety of reasons. The main reason was that Lotus Domino was an awesome platform for writing and publishing XML, but, in my opinion, it was a poor platform for reading and processing XML. I needed something a lot more like a traditional scripted programming environment for the creation and display of the final HTML. Microsoft IIS/ASP fit the bill because it had an XML parser that worked well on the server side and was able to read and process the XML published out of the Lotus Domino.