However, you'll also be familiar with a bigger world out there--one in which some companies or individuals cannot afford to run their own servers on a T1 line or to rent space on a Domino hosting service. A real world where most Web sites are not run on Lotus Domino, and where an increasing number of people (this author included) are choosing to access the Internet on PalmPilots and other devices.

There are solutions to extend Domino services to all manner of devices, and the quantity and cost-effectiveness of Domino hosting provision is improving steadily. However, wouldn't it be great if you could Domino-enable just one or two Web forms on any site, regardless of whether it was running ASP pages, static HTML, or being accessed by AvantGo users? Wouldn't it be great to be able to use standard HTML forms, generated in any Web design package, yet have the forms fed automatically into Domino workflows?

This article will show you how you can do that, with a mixture of old Lotus Notes techniques, tried and tested Web technology, and a sprinkling of new code.

HTML forms
Web forms are simple things--a few special tags to create fields, drop down boxes, and radio buttons, plus two special buttons: one to reset all values, and another to submit the form. Creating a Web form is trivial, especially if you have good Web design software. Any Notes form can be converted very quickly to a Web form simply by previewing it in a Web browser and saving the resulting Web page.

The difficult part is generally in processing the form once it's submitted to a server. Originally, this meant writing a custom CGI (Common Gateway Interface) program--often in Perl--to take the form submission, update any back-end systems, and generate a new HTML page to return to the browser user. On a Domino server, this complexity is all handled by Domino itself. It receives the form submission and creates a new Notes document in the appropriate database automatically.

FormMail
Way back in ancient Internet time (around five years ago), simpler alternatives to writing custom CGI code emerged. Typical of these, and most useful of all, was the form-by-email script. Best known amongst them is the FormMail package, available now for a wide range of servers at Matt's Script Archive (at http://www.worldwidemart.com/scripts/formmail.shtml). Such CGI routines accept any form submission and send the results as a formatted email message to an address specified in the script, or more usefully, in a hidden field on the form.