Lotus Domino is no exception to this. In fact, Domino is one of those technologies that, for some reason, inspires its followers to be exceedingly passionate, to the point of fundamentalism. If you've worked with Domino for any reasonable period of time I'm sure you know the type of person that I'm talking about. During any discussion about Web technology they will try to tell you that Domino is the ideal solution and that everything else is crap. Domino fanatics can't quite believe that Domino has not taken over the world and are deeply resentful of Microsoft technologies. Domino fanatics believe that Domino is the best!

So at risk of alienating myself from the faithful DominoPower reader, I'm going to reveal that I'm not fanatical about Domino. Domino is a good technology and it does its job well. Domino can do things that a lot of other systems can't. Domino has pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages, strengths and weaknesses. Domino happens to be the development technology that I know best and have the most experience with, but in the end, it's just another tool in the toolbox. There are things that Domino doesn't do so well, and when you find that Domino isn't the best solution, you must be able to select and use the tool that will do the job.

In 2002, any professional developer should have a range of tools in their toolbox, ready to tackle the wide variety of tasks required to construct a major software application. If you've only got Lotus Domino in your toolbox, you don't have enough tools to get your job done. Get out there and learn. Learn new languages and operating systems, or at least have a passing familiarity with them and understand their strengths and weaknesses well enough that you know when to use them. Learn Perl, buy a Python book, download the WebSphere trial. You'll be making yourself more valuable to your company and your clients and you'll make yourself more employable. I'm not advocating that you abandon Domino, merely suggesting that you broaden your horizons.

Anyway, the reason that I've told you all of this is because this month the focus is on the HTML display templates component of my content management system, written using Microsoft IIS/ASP.

Microsoft IIS/ASP in DominoPower? Gasp!

Context
In previous articles we've had a look at the architecture of the Content Management System. We've also explored the system requirements and taken a tour of the XML API.

The next thing to do is build finished HTML pages from the XML that is output from the Lotus Domino based Content Management System.

You'll recall that in Article two, in the June 2002 issue at http://www.dominopower.com/issues/issue200206/kontentman001.html, I described the architecture of the Content Management System, with Lotus Domino being used as the central repository for content, providing a content administration interface and outputting the content in XML format.