Following up on other Domino Web development "pet peeves", we developed the thingFactory, a set of objects or functionality a developer can quickly insert into a Domino Web application. That became our second product.

Scott: Hundreds of companies and partners around the world use these Web technologies on a daily basis (even some so classified that we can't openly talk about them).

To showcase our Web technologies, we've just released version 2.0 of DocLogic Document Manager, our Web-based document and content management platform for Domino environments.

So far we've won eight awards from IBM Lotus Awards (formerly "Beacon" Awards) to the Advisor Editors' Choice Gold Award for Best Document and Content Management Award two years running and just completed our best year ever from a financial perspective.

David: One of the reasons we wanted to do this interview was because you're doing some interesting stuff involving Domino, AJAX and RSS. Can you tell us what you see is the role of these technologies for business applications?

Marek: We've always been proponents of creating Web browser applications that act much like desktop Windows applications. We've always detested the page refresh often associated with browser applications and one of the major reasons we introduced the thingFactory a few years ago.

The roles of Domino, AJAX and RSS are no secret. We love Domino for its Rapid Application Development (RAD) platform, plus the shear total functionality as a solution. Still today, there is nothing that can measure up to Domino as such a broad and cost effective solution.

AJAX [Asychronous Javascript and XML], despite being a new acronym on a years-old idea, has at least been giving attention to the idea of creating browser applications that act like Windows applications. We have been doing this for several years just like many other people and chuckled when so much attention was suddenly afforded to using JavaScript and the XmlHttpRequest object.

For us, it was validation in the computing industry that the way we were approaching development was being recognized and adopted. AJAX though, as you've certainly read before, needs to be used in places where it makes sense. The role of AJAX for us is about performance and application usability. In DocLogic, we employ it in several ways to deliver a very powerful and usable interface for users while making the application very efficient at the same time.

RSS is a nice and simple way to serve up or consume information that is typically associated with users on an individual basis. It also provides communication between users without littering peoples' email.

Use of these technologies to us means delivering sophisticated business applications without having to get convoluted in the background. We use the same principles over and over again. If you look at our DocLogic application, you will agree that the functionality that is built-in can be "eye-popping", however, I think other developers would be pleasantly surprised at how simple and straightforward the implementation is. AJAX and RSS help us do that and make our application highly customizable and easy to understand.