InformationWeek

May 31, 1999

Lotus' Platform Play

Lotus Development's Domino has become much more than mere groupware--it's a full-fledged enterprise application platform, combining aspects of Web app servers, databases, messaging servers, and more

By Sean Gallagher and Steve Gillmor

Related links:

The New Domino Theory

A Notes-Worthy Release

And from our sister publications:

Computer Reseller News SAP, Lotus Unveil Domino Connector

Computer Reseller News Lotus Domino And Notes Release 5.0

TechWeb Lotus To Ship App Dev Platform

ver since Lotus Development Corp. was acquired by IBM in 1995, it was clear there was something more to Lou Gerstner's attraction to the company than just his fondness for its yellow-and-black boxes. The object of IBM's acquisitiveness was Lotus' Notes groupware technology--and its customer base.

Domino, the spawn of Notes, is now much more than groupware. It has become a full-fledged enterprise application platform, blurring the edges of categories such as Web application servers, databases, messaging servers, directory servers, and middleware. Lotus' platform strategy appears to live up to the company's latest tagline, "A Part of Every Solution."

Lotus has done this by following a two-tiered strategy. First, it has embraced existing Internet and distributed computing standards while porting Domino to more operating systems and hardware platforms. Second, the company's Iris Associates development subsidiary continues to find ways to leverage the core Domino technology and extend the platform even further--incorporating the Sametime real-time collaboration technology and the QuickPlace ad hoc Web collaboration server into the Domino platform, for example.

IBM's other Web and development technologies are also being incorporated into the Domino platform. With the addition of integration with IBM's WebSphere Java applet server and VisualAge For Java development tools into Domino release 5, and the incorporation of NetObjects Fusion as part of Domino's developer package, Domino has gained some development tool depth.

All of this increases Domino's credibility as an enterprise development platform. But how far does Lotus' platform strategy scale? Certainly, there are some applications that don't play to Domino's strengths. Still, Lotus is poised to do the one thing Netscape couldn't do before its acquisition by America Online Inc.: offer a real, scalable, cross-platform alternative to Microsoft's Windows-dominated architecture. For companies that want to build their applications on a standards-based, Web-driven architecture and leverage their host systems, Domino offers an architecture that can get them there.

At the same time, Lotus continues to make the best of what Microsoft has to offer. Notes and Domino have long taken advantage of OLE automation on the desktop, integrating Notes into Windows office-automation products such as Microsoft Office. More recently, Lotus has been crafting its Domino server for Windows NT to integrate more tightly into that operating system. Domino release 5 is essentially a third-party BackOffice application server; it integrates with Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) as an option to its own Web server.

The Microsoft Frontier
But Domino will soon go much farther into Microsoft territory. At its Lotusphere 99 user conference in January, Lotus product manager Gary Devendorf revealed that Lotus would add integration with Microsoft's Component Object Model and Distributed COM (DCOM) application frameworks into an upcoming subrelease of Domino. When combined with Domino's support for Corba (new in Domino release 5), this lets Lotus play the role of broker between brokers. Domino can essentially be used as bridging middleware between the COM and Corba worlds, and Domino developers will be able to draw on the best features of each environment as needed.

Domino's COM integration will allow the platform to use COM components--including business-logic components and other programs written in Microsoft tools such as Visual Basic--within the Domino distributed application environment. Domino applications will be able to use the functionality found in other apps--such as database access and spreadsheets--and expose their functionality to other COM applications, such as its fax gateway and data store. Office-automation applications will be able to make direct calls to the Notes server's document store to save or check out files directly to or from it, for example. And COM development tools--including Microsoft's Visual Basic, Visual C++, and Visual Interdev--will be able to use Lotus' Domino Objects back-end classes as components of their own applications. COM will also let developers call LotusScript, Java, JavaScript, Corba, and OLE automation objects within Domino, and drive Domino events.

Domino will provide a dual interface to the COM environment, using both Microsoft's IDispatch dispatch interface (used by OLE automation and by Microsoft's VBScript scripting language and Active Server Pages application format for Internet Information Server) and COM custom interfaces. This means Domino components can be used as part of Microsoft IIS Internet and intranet applications, as well as other applications based on BackOffice.