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Some reason? The guy created the Lotus Notes. Compared to that Windows 3.1 should be hanging in The Louvre.

• "Survival of the unfittest | Technology | The Guardian"
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/feb/09/guardianweeklytechnologysection
• "Damien Katz: 70 Reasons Lotus Notes Sucks"
  http://damienkatz.net/2005/02/70-reasons-lotus-notes-sucks.html
• http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com/
• http://www.ihatelotusnotes.com/
• http://www.google.com.au/search?q=lotus+notes+sucks

And I can related. I used to be in the "J2EE is the only proper way to do things" camp too. Read about 4,000 pages worth of books cover to cover about everything from Struts, Hibernate, Tapestry, and EJB's on. Also thought all interfaces should be done with XML and XSLT because it was just the right way. Preached about it to people.

Then reality actually hit. I went to work for a large telecom company who's upper management constantly was obsessed with converting everything into J2EE but because I had some PHP experience I ended up doing both and got to live in both worlds.

The result was was that, of about 80 different internal and external websites that worked 75 of them were PHP, 4 were J2EE, and 1 was ASP (pre.NET). Our team of 3 developers maintained all 75 PHP sites and 1 of the J2EE apps. The other three J2EE apps each had a team of 8 people on average, dedicated DBA's (because the application "required" Oracle). The ASP app only worked in IE6 and had 3 people responsible for it.

Now, exactly what does it say about maintainability when 3 people can maintain 75 different sites and have spare time for new development. After a while, when my eyes were officially opened to the man hours / licensing fees wasted on pursuing the "right" way of doing things we convinced our VP to let us rewrite a particularly buggy J2EE app that we had to interface with a lot. This system had take 6 months for 5 people to build.

Our team rewrote the entire thing in 1 night, bug-free for at least the next 1.5 years too (I left for another job after that).

The lesson that we learned was simply this: practical abstraction.

You can strive for ideals all day long, but if the ideals are so bloated that it takes 8 people to do the job of 1 person it is no longer cost effective.

With J2EE you spend so much time learning all of the "right way" to do things that it prevents you from having any amount of time to learn all the other surrounding web technologies. You also end up with people who are literally afraid to learn anything new because they've invested so much time into learning what they already know. Ever meet Java people who think EVERYTHING needs to be done in Java? That's why.

At the same time, a language like PHP that you can be polished with in a week is a powerful tool in the hands of a good developer. It gets a bad rap because it's so easy to learn a little bit at a time that designers and other people with no formal programming background at all are able to jump in and create some bad code.

For further reading material, check out "The Top 10 Signs You're a Crappy Programmer (and don't know it)." http://damienkatz.net/2006/05/signs_youre_a_c.html

CouchDB, which has been generating some hype lately (especially among Rails fans), is by Damien Katz, who did work on LotusNotes and Domino, and claims CouchDB is inspired by that.

According to him, Lotus got a lot of things wrong, but it got the database right.

I don't know if there would be anything to gain from the original (even just to read through it), or if we should all be focused on CouchDB now, but it would be interesting to find out.

why is this modded flamebait? Truth as flamebait? Slashdot mods amazes me sometimes.

Prove me wrong, don't call it flamebait because it hurts your political views. Perhaps it is the nine year old needing a license to sell lemonade? That too is true.

http://damienkatz.net/2005/08/child_labor_ope.html

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2005/08/03/when_life_hands_you_lemons/

My basic premise was that licensing was a barrier to entry into the market. The proof is often absurd as it is outrageous.

Tell me again what licensing does? What qualifications does it take to open a lemonade stand?

Will MySQL consider positioning itself for Document Databases too (http://couchdb.org/) (Damien Katz works for MySQL: http://damienkatz.net/2004/12/about-me.html).

http://www.couchdb.com/ is a distributed replicable non-relational database written in Erlang. It is a very clever system and I was impressed with the language choice of the developer.

but if it is "web services" you want which is the XML passing thing with WSDL and so on then Notes does support that natively, you can add web services design elements to applications for consumers to consume. If you want to know more about NRPC which is the native Notes protocol over port 1352 then that is pretty well documented already. It is a decent enough protocol, but perhaps a bit dated now. The fashion these days is for bloated XML based protocols which then get compressed for transit rather than tight efficient binary protocols which can also get compressed and encrypted. GPL Notes client really isn't going to happen from IBM, however check out CouchDB which is being developed by Damien Katz, a former IBM developer who wrote the new formula language engine.http://damienkatz.net/

Who moved my Hasselhoff?

1. Notes has an odd UI with some challenges, we agree on that. Of course, that's because it was DESIGNED TO BE CROSS PLATFORM. In fact, the next rev includes a LINUX CLIENT.

It was designed to *run* on multiple platforms (which they still screwed up; why did it take so long to get a working Linux version?), but it's definitely not "cross-platform."

Firefox is cross-platform. When it's running on a Mac, the Preferences menu item goes into the application menu where it belongs. It uses sensible font sizes that mere mortals can actually read. It uses Macintosh standard keyboard shortcuts. And I consider Firefox for Mac a mediocre port... it doesn't have access to the OS X spell-checker, for instance.

Notes on Macintosh looks, feels, and runs *exactly* like Notes on Windows. (Which, BTW, isn't how a Windows application is supposed to look, feel or run.) It also helpfully decides to use microscopic 8-point fonts all over the place that nobody can read.

So, given all these things -- every one of which is something in general /.'ers scream for, WHAT IS THE F'ING PROBLEM?

Have you ever tried to USE it? Have you ever just looked at Notes' main menu and said, "holy shit this app looks ugly?" The calendar doesn't work; it loses meetings all the time. It doesn't sync with any handhelds out there unless you buy IBM's EasySyncPro and EasySyncPro randomly fails about once a week with mysterious errors that can only be solved by forcing a full synchronization (which takes several minutes.) When you hit F5 to refresh your mail, Notes locks you out for no apparent reason. It takes up to a FULL MINUTE to open an email on my 1.7 ghz, 512 MB RAM PC at work if it gets swapped out of RAM. Nobody can figure out how to do basic tasks like changing the password or setting up a mail rule. Settings are grouped in the most moronic fashion ever... how come my preferred browser for viewing HTML mail is in the "Location" setting but the interval for checking for new mail is in "User Settings?" Also, have you ever seen Lotus Notes attempt to render HTML? It's pathetic. If there's an error in a script you'll see a dialog that reads "Error: Object cannot update Property" and Notes won't tell you *which* object or *which* property, making it entirely impossible to debug anything.

Note has compelling features. All of them are implemented in a confusing and half-assed fashion.

Users hate Notes. Admins hate Notes. There are only two types of people who like Notes:
1) IBM salesmen who talk CFOs (generally ones who don't even use email) into buying it and making huge commissions
2) Notes developers. And I think that's more a case of Stockholm Syndrome than anything else.

See this blog for only a small sampling of things Lotus Notes sucks at: http://damienkatz.net/2005/02/70-reasons-lotus-not es-sucks.html

http://damienkatz.net/2005/04/fuck_vonage.html

See here: Fuck Vonage

Lots of great comments there too.

I seriously doubt Ray will do anything with Exchange. I've worked on the bowels of Lotus Notes and I've also done a little development work with Exchange. The two are extremely different, from storage to security to development nearly every facet is different, I doubt Ray wants to spend time thinking about someone else's disjointed architecture. Besides, Ray has already gone on record as saying that email is doomed (I don't agree), but that tells me he isn't at all interested in the email space.

However, I am very suprised that he's going to be CTO of MS, he's always been super friendly and encouraging to me even when I was just a peon, it seems like the wrong position for a guy like him. You'd think the MS CTO would need to be a real ballbreaker. I really hope it works out for him.

Damien Katz