1. They give us a Java interface, except:
a. You have to do everything on a special Notes thread, and it leaks memory every time you have a new thread which wants to use Notes.
b. Despite it being a Java API, they make you recycle() every tiny object, even DateTime!
c. If you ask for the same document (whether via a view or via its note ID) twice, recycling one of these will fuck over your reference to the other one, regardless of whether you still need it or now.

2. When the system runs out of memory, the OS returns 0 for calls to memory allocation functions. Notes doesn’t care — it will try to use the space it has been returned, and promptly die screaming, taking down the entire application which has had the misfortune of loading their badly-coded DLL.

3. 64-bit? What is 64-bit? Someone was talking about 8.0.1 having 64-bit and then that turned out to be a big fat lie, didn’t it?

Thanks a lot, guys.

Here’s how to fix the problem:

1. Fix the Java API. Wrap Notes resources in proper wrapper objects which don’t get directly returned to user code, and don’t *require* user code to recycle() in order to not crash. Another pro-tip, close() is a much more standard name. Don’t require cleanup *at all* for objects like dates which should be simple types!

2. Check the return value for every memory allocation!

3. Give us a 64-bit port already.

For extra points:

4. Give us a native Java API so that we don’t even need to worry about shoddy DLLs being loaded.

If all these things were finally fixed, Notes would actually be a very good platform. But at the moment it’s just a joke.

Curt Stone and Roland Reddekop.

As usual Lotus brings a knife to a gunfight.

I can also say than whoever wins a ticket should have a great opportunity to see Lotus products, take certification tests w/discount, talk to the actual IBM developers who make the product, and attend fuzzy brochure type sessions or hardcore productivity sessions whether on the development side, the administrator side, or a company’s management. It’s also a great location for those who want to blow off their company’s investment and just do some partying…

Although set within a strict tabbed methodology Lotus Notes is it is way past “web 2.0″ from the Notes Client-side. The wheels of “web 2.0″ that are finally “maturing” (related to what we’ve had to date on port 80) have been in Lotus a really long time. Moreover, as the web technologies have improved, overall, IBM Lotus has done a great job of adding them to Lotus Notes/Domino, as well. Lotus Domino web applications and can consume and deliver web services, dynamical HTML (it has native support for JavaScript), has native support for JAVA on the server-side for agents, has ability for inherited libraries (yours, or others) to do many different web programming techniques including things like REST. It includes POP3, IMAP, SSL, S-MIME, and LDAP services. It has native support for its own internal security Notes-based CA and x-509 certificates. With the Standard 8 client we added widgets, feeds, and other great plug-ins. With the new 8.5 version, it has a very cool new development feature called “XPages” – that little feature by itself would qualify.

In fact, if IBM would rework the old workspace icons have a black background, with rounded edges, and smaller icons, you’d might confuse it with the brand new cutting edge GUI of the Apple iTunes software. The difference is that Lotus Notes has lasted so long, its once again cutting edge with just a little tweaking. All they had to do was keep those workspace “chicklets” until “fashion” circled back again. :-)

__________________

As for all the other off-topic rants, I guess I can play too…
Lotus Notes is NOT like MS products. As someone who was a MS developer and Outlook user, I hated Notes, too. But it’s same kind of hate that is more principal ate that is blind out of principal rather than actually look at the product. It’s not a relational database, it’s a collaboration product — it’s people and document workflow, it’s people interaction and data integration.

Lotus Notes is a product that is proprietary but open-source/standards friendly. Yes, it doesn’t do a .Net, but it does VB and Java. Not many products support version 1 or 2 applications (databases) running in the current version of the software with no or very little design updates.

Right before Christmas, I had yet another company that wondered why Notes sucks to only find out it’s because of what they made it do. They had several complaints, all were fixed by simply changing how they used the software.
For example:
They said during the meeting that “Searching sucks and they hoped that 8.02 would fix it.” The fix – Allow and create full-text indexes on their mail files so the Notes client can search reliably. It was as simply as selecting the lucky people in the admin client, and clicking the option to create the indexes.

I also hear things like:
Performance sucks. This is usually either a very busy network, poor implementation of the Domino server’s “admin” side, or hacked mail templates with “improvements” that significantly restrict the user to a very limited mail environment. The user usually says something like, you’d think that they could improve the mail file in “x” years. IBM does, the users are still using a 4.x mail hack when their servers are 8.x.

One of the great things about Lotus Notes is that departments can really quickly get up an internal app really quickly and with little experience. The bad thing is these applications often suffer usability issues. The largest $100,000+(dev and setup costs conversion) I got to participate on from Lotus Notes was for the data conversion part of a Notes to Websphere, SharePoint, and Outlook conversion (yes, no savings there, 4 Lotus e-mail and app servers became 8-exchange boxes to do same e-mail load. They made SharePoint basically do simple public folders/workspaces with checkin/checkout. Websphere was needed for the core functionality as SharePoint could scale.) The apps that made Lotus “so bad” were valid complaints. They were VERY bad – they could have been a really bad PHP and mySQL or .NET implementation. It would have been much smarter to simply fix the existing applications – there were three of these “core” applications. I know for a fraction of that conversion budget, I would have happily recreated those applications from scratch to run on a replicated set of Domino app servers that would have done very nicely. There was nothing “transactional” which required specific relational roll-back. I could also have done it just as fast as the .NET guys were doing the SharePoint part, and the Websphere and database groups creating theirs. It was so wrong on so many levels. It was right on only one way, it paid my families bills for a period.

I’m a Lotus Notes developer ( 10 years) working on a Lotus Notes (applications) to Sharepoint migration.

Regarding comparing the two products – don’t.

Lotus Notes is not Sharepoint and why would it want to be.

I’m get conflicting sources regarding Sharepoint’s capabilities. Everythings possible I’m told but it will either take you an age to code it rather than just check a property (allow values not in list, refresh keywords) or you could do it but wouldn’t want to do it (item level security).

I love the big selling point of self service of Sharepoint sites – pushing IT roles on to the business!

My other frustration thing is the number of products used to replace Lotus Notes. If you cannot do it Sharepoint why not do it in another MS product, say InfoPath. If that does not fit your needs then why not do it from scratch in .Net. Now instead of the business knowing what I.T. solutions can be offered using one product they have to think about multiple products that esentailly all compete with each other.

Thanks to all who commented.

Learn InfoPath. Your list will be much smaller. Not gone, but smaller.

I also have a smart plug-in to demonstrate at Lotusphere, which my team has developed to tremendously enhance value of “sametime client” to users.