After that, just think about why Lotus Notes is on more corporate desktops than any other piece of software except for Microsoft Office. Lotus Domino is an all-in-one solution, a rapid application development environment. It does everything quite well. By its nature, it's a quick fix. It is the software you turn to when you simply must get a new system running right now in order to secure that next contract or support the new product you just launched. The people who need Lotus Notes and Domino are not patient people. They want results now, and they don't want to see lots of system flow charts and non-functional prototypes. They want a real system up and working fairly soon after lunch. These are not the characteristics of a Java environment. In fact, they bear very little resemblance to J2EE at all.

This really happened to me. A manager walked up to my desk and explained that he needed a new application for a project he was starting. And then he stood there, arms crossed, while I wrote it, deployed it, and set up the security for it. If you're not sure yet why you use Domino, that's why. And guess what? It didn't occur to me to write the application in Java. Not because I don't know how; I can write a Java agent if I have to. But, unless you need features that only Java can provide, like multi-threading or HTTP class libraries, Java is the worst choice for writing your Lotus Domino agents and events because it's more complex to write and maintain than formula language or Lotuscript.

In Al Zollar's article, "Lotus evolution to contextual collaboration," (at http://www.lotus.com/news/news.nsf/a47bf6d43eeaa55e85256659005cfe50/a8f8ea216199af2985256bb300537766?OpenDocument) he emphasized how Domino would build on J2EE. But what does that really mean? For a start, Zollar uses the example of SameTime as a future service we can just drop into an application and start using. Well that's fine, but SameTime is not a feature of Domino, nice though it is. Secondly, Zollar says Lotus will bring RAD to J2EE, but how does that help Domino?

The lack of true rapid application development and over-complexity are weaknesses of servers like Weblogic and WebSphere, and it seems Domino is destined to help solve the problem. But for customers buying Lotus Domino, the fact that it helps J2EE-based servers out of a hole is only a useful feature if you are already digging.

The agent mystery
If you're following the technical debate in this article and on the forums, you're now aware that WebSphere does one thing much better than Domino: running Java agents quickly. WebSphere loads the agent--sorry, I should say servlet--in memory so it can be used many times with no start up delay. Now I'll pause for a few moments and let you mull over that thought, because something is not right here.

Anything spring to mind yet?

No? Nothing at all?

Yes, you got there in the end. Why on earth does Domino not copy this trick? IBM could rewrite the way the agent manager works so nominated agents stay loaded and therefore improve performance.