On June 24, 2013, British IT consultant and author James Martin died in his adopted home country of Bermuda at the age of 79. Martin achieved many things in his life, he wrote more than 100 books, founded companies James Martin Associates and Knowledgeware, and made enough money to buy his own island in Bermuda. He also made the largest single donation to Oxford University, establishing the Oxford Martin School in 2004.
Martin was an expert in the field of software engineering and took a special interest in software development methodologies, pioneering new and better ways of working from the late 70s onwards. Rapid Application Development (RAD) is a term familiar to many of us who have been around the Notes and Domino environment since the early 90s. It’s a concept that has been around the software engineering world since at least the late 70s, but it was James Martin who formalized RAD into a defined process in 1991.
At the heart of Martin’s RAD process are the concepts of prototyping and rapid iteration. The idea is to rapidly put together a prototype of an application and then work iteratively with users to refine the application until it’s deemed to be ready for a first release. RAD built applications didn’t necessarily always scale well, but for small workgroups it enabled very high value apps to be build incredibly quickly.
Lotus Notes was released in 1989 and by the time version 3 arrived in 1993, Notes was gaining a foothold in large organizations. Notes, of course, embraced and enabled the concepts of RAD, but took it a step further, enabling individual users to build their own applications, without the need for a programmer/analyst. For those of us who were brought up on a diet of COBOL and Fortran with a side of PL/1, this was pretty amazing stuff.
Anyhow, the point is that, not only was RAD baked into the Notes and Domino platform from the very beginning, it’s largely responsible, in our opinion, for its meteoric success. And for the fact that even now, 30 years later, there are still so many Domino applications embedded in some of the world’s largest corporations and government institutions.
Gradually though, as people started to build more complex applications based on Domino, more and more programming features were built into the development environment. Formula code was originally the only way to build logic into a Notes app, and quickly ran out of steam, so LotusScript was introduced. The development environment was separated into its own application - Domino Designer, based on the Eclipse framework. Support for Java was added, along with a whole slew of new capabilities that alienated end users and moved the whole platform further and further away from the original concept of users being able to build their own simple, forms based apps. Just a glance at the contents page for the Domino Designer doc gives you a sense of how complex the environment has become.
Since HCL acquired the Domino platform last year, they have brought a truly compelling vision to the product strategy. They have recognized Domino Designer for what it is - a tool for professional developers. They have modernized the so-called pro-code environment by adding support for JavaScript and Node.JS.
But way, way more significant than that, in our opinion, is that they have now gone back to the roots of Domino and introduced a way for users to quickly assemble simple forms based applications without the need to write a line of code. Now it’s called no code (or low code, if some simple logic is required). But it’s essentially the same concept that made Notes so incredibly successful all those years ago.
Wisely, HCL has not tried to balance some new piece of technology atop the huge and unruly stack that is Domino Designer. They’ve built a new product to do this, and they just launched it last week: Domino Volt. We’ll go into more details of what Volt is and how it works in a later post, but for now, here are the key points:
You can create an app in minutes, by building from scratch, by importing a spreadsheet, or by using a template.
You can add workflow, including approvals, which can be based on roles.
Volt is based on pure Domino and uses the Domino security model, including roles.
App data can be easily visualized in reports and graphs.
Anonymous access is not supported in the initial release, so you can’t use it to build public facing applications. This will be added in a later release though.
Volt requires at least Domino v11.0.1.
We don’t know this for certain, of course, but we have a feeling that James Martin would approve.
To learn more about Domino Volt, or to chat with us about any aspect of licensing HCL Domino, click below to start a conversation. We love to chat!