I knew it was a somewhat weird combination of server technologies, but I also knew it would work extremely well. At last, XML had allowed Lotus Domino to interoperate easily with Microsoft IIS/ASP. In fact, it fit like a glove.

Browser based user interface: a revolutionary idea
At about the same time, a friend of mine named Greg Patten (at http://www.iconsult.com.au) showed me something that changed the way that I thought about application development. Greg was using the Internet well before the masses made it popular. Greg is a Perl guru who built one of the first Web sites in Australia, built one of the first intranets in Australia, and has been using Linux since its earliest days. He's a true innovator. He also happens to be the drummer in one of Australia's funkiest bands. What's the deal with musicians and computers?

What Greg showed me was an invoicing application he'd built in which the entire user interface functionality lived inside a Web browser. Again, in 2002 you might say, "So what?" But back in early 1998, such stuff wasn't commonplace. For me, it was a revolutionary insight into the future. Greg's forward thinking inspired me to take the same approach with my Content Management System. The entire user interface would be browser based. There would be no Lotus Notes user interface whatsoever.

In fact, at that moment, I decided never to build an application with a Lotus Notes user interface again.

The architecture comes together
The key components of the server architecture were now in place, and I was extremely pleased with how it all fit together. Figure A shows an overview of the system architecture:

FIGURE A


Here's an overview of the system architecture. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Many side benefits came from this architecture, not the least being that XML allowed the content and display to be separated so cleanly that it would be possible to completely replace the server technology on either side of the XML API interface structure without breaking the system. As long as the XML was output in the expected format, it didn't matter if it was Lotus Domino, Microsoft IIS, Linux/PHP, or something else serving it up.

At the end of this process, I had discovered XML and I had discovered that XML is the solution to Lotus Domino's notorious reluctance to talk to any other software systems. In a word, XML is interoperability, and it would form the heart of my Content Management System.

You may gather from the above that the first task in designing this system was to think up the architecture. This isn't quite true. Strictly speaking, the first step in software design is actually to understand and document the software functional requirements. In part two of this series, which you can read right now elsewhere in this issue of DominoPower, we'll delve into designing the software architecture and specifying the system requirements. Look for the article, "Building a Content Management System using Lotus Domino: software architecture and system requirements."

Joe is a ZATZ associate editor. Prior to this job, he was customer support manager for the FileFlex database engine.