I had initially hoped to go into far more depth regarding the inner workings of the system, but I've realized that such a task is more deserving of a book than of a series of overview articles. It just isn't possible to quickly and easily describe the output of many man-years of programming in any sort of depth.

What I do hope to have done is to show you that Lotus Domino is an excellent technology for building content management applications. By using XML you can make your Domino based content management system interact smoothly and easily with pretty much any other technology out there today, be it Microsoft, WebSphere, PHP, Delphi, or whatever.

I also wanted to illustrate the point that you can plan for platform independence or building cross platform versions of your software by using normal Web standards such as XML API's and browser based user interfaces. In the case of this content management system, it would be possible to rebuild the system entirely using some other server technology without having to change any of the functionality at all.

Initial objectives
Let's recall the objectives that I had in mind at the commencement of development. The initial objectives were to build a content management system that:

• is full featured and powerful;
• is completely browser based;
• does not require end users to have any programming knowledge at all;
• includes all the features and functions needed to build most Web sites;
• is easily extensible and expandable;
• is easily maintained.

Based upon these objectives the following system architecture was established:

• XML is the heart of the system;
• Lotus Domino is used for content administration and maintenance;
• Lotus Domino publishes the site content in XML format;
• Microsoft IIS/ASP is used to pick up the XML and generate the finished HTML.

The finished content management system does meet the initial project objectives. That's the primary goal in software development.

Using the finished system
I know I'm biased, but using the finished system is a pleasure. It does everything that I need a content management system to do, and it does it easily and intuitively. The content management system makes constructing and maintaining a Web site is a pleasure rather than a chore.

Setting aside the fact that I designed the system and therefore it would meet my requirements, I think that such functionality and ease of use can be attributed primarily to three factors:

• The design of the content management system was based upon considerable previous knowledge of building earlier generations of less sophisticated content management systems;

• Much thought was put into the earliest stages of the project--working out the functional requirements and the features needed in the system;

• Much thought was put into designing the architecture of the system, ensuring in advance that the architecture would accommodate all of the previously specified features and functions.