The latest dust-up comes on the heels of IBM's stated plans at Lotusphere in January to remove much of Garnet, the Java-based application development environment in Domino. It was caused by public comments made earlier this month by IBM Senior Vice President Steve Mills that Notes would be fully WebSphere-based as early as next year, with DB2 replacing the current Notes file system known as the Notes Storage Facility, or NSF.

In retrospect we know that most of the technical detail in that statement is inaccurate. Domino has had a Java development environment for a number of years, it's unlikely ever to be "WebSphere-based" even if that were technically possible, and the enormity of the task required to substitute DB2 for NSF is going to keep that on the back burner for awhile. The real risk is that these sorts of statements create confusion and uncertainty among corporate users and their technical staff. They start to ask if their continued investment in Lotus products is worthwhile if they're to be faced with a wholesale migration to expensive and unfamiliar new products when Lotus Domino software is discontinued. And the people whose careers depend on rival products are quick to describe Domino as "legacy" technology.

To give an example of the extremes to which this storm of misinformation reached, IBM published an article that is still on its developerWorks Web site (at http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/library/i-notes) containing this quote:

Since part 1 of this series was published, IBM made a formal announcement about rewriting Notes completely in J2EE in the next year or two. I applaud IBM's move because J2EE is the right direction. However, many users are asking, "What are we going to do with our existing applications in Notes/Domino?"

If you read too many articles like that one you could be forgiven for thinking that J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition), Sun Microsystem's Java-based Web application architecture, is replacing Domino in the near future. Lotus hasn't helped their own case by publishing a "roadmap" (at http://www.lotus.com/news/news.nsf/link/Dominoroadmap) to help you choose whether to use Domino or the J2EE-based WebSphere, which implies they are equivalent products.

Yet only this week I read an article by Bob Balaban (who was a key developer for Lotus) in September's Lotus Advisor entitled "JSPs: A Total Waste of Time?" (at http://lotusadvisor.com/Articles.nsf/aid/BALAB07) in which he expresses a well-founded dislike for JSP, a vital component of J2EE. So what are we to make of these statements about Lotus Domino's future? Should we, as many articles have proposed, all become Java programmers? Should we all book a WebSphere training course?