InformationWeek

May 31, 1999

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Lotus' Platform Play

continued...page 2 of 4

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The integration goes in the other direction as well. Domino's services can be called by other COM, DCOM, and (in Windows 2000) COM+ applications anywhere on a Windows network. Developers could choose to use the Domino directory service, certificate server, or any other exposed functionality within the Domino server instead of using Microsoft versions of these services, and do so successfully both in the Windows environment and elsewhere.

The upside of this integration is that it essentially turns Microsoft developers into Domino developers, harnessing Microsoft's mammoth developer community. It also extends the reach of those Microsoft developers even further.

That's something Lotus needs badly. Lotus' developer community is growing rapidly, but it's still infinitesimal when compared with Microsoft's developer base. And while Domino's integrated development tools have improved in recent releases, Lotus is not a developer-tools company--and it shows. The company's Lotus Components ActiveX controls have been shelved as a development technology--though they live on in some form in other products, such as Lotus' QuickPlace collaborative Web tool--and the company is just now really gathering steam behind its eSuite Java component architecture.

Despite its collection of development tools, IBM's strengths play specifically toward those who like to work deep in the code--its VisualAge tools are built for consultants, not for rapid development. Co-opting Microsoft's own tools for its own ends makes the Lotus platform that much more viable.

While Lotus may not have as big a developer community as Microsoft, it definitely has a strong third-party development community built around the Domino platform. The integration of COM into Domino potentially opens up new markets for many Domino partners, and opens the door to many more independent software vendors to sign up with Lotus.

Domino And XML
In the long term, perhaps an even bigger development than COM integration for Lotus is the Extensible Markup Language. XML is emerging as the next de facto standard for business-to-business data interchange, and Lotus has identified XML as another opportunity to extend Domino's reach.

XML's document-oriented nature matches up well with Domino's core technology: a replicated document database. Domino keeps structured data separate from forms, just as XML does. Besides electronic data interchange and transaction applications, XML can be used for data presentation on the Web, as well as structured documents, enhancing search-engine performance, and office-automation suite file formats.

Lotus outlined its plans for XML during another session at Lotusphere. Part of that future is already here; the tools to build XML applications--including an XML style-sheet (XSL) engine for Domino--are already available from IBM's Alphaworks Web site (alphaworks.ibm.com). Domino release 5's applets already use XML internally; all developers have to do is build XML style sheets to take advantage of the existing code.

Lotus is in the process of fully documenting Domino's internal XML functionality for developers, and may further extend those capabilities this year. XML content can also be pumped out to browsers via a Java applet, or using the LotusXSL parsing engine to essentially print content out to HTML format. Beyond this year, Lotus is moving toward automated import and export of XML in Domino, and exposing XML support within Domino's development tools.