By Nigel Cheshire
The Lotus Notes client. Love it or hate it, you have to admit that, back in the day (where “the day” is somewhere in the mid-90s), it was a revolutionary piece of software. Like CC:Mail on steroids, it was an email and calendaring application that let anyone build forms-based business apps with workflow built in. And, with replication. Though it sounds daft now, for those of us old enough to remember standing at an airport departure gate with our laptop precariously balanced on top of an AT&T payphone, plugged in to the data port, replication was nothing short of a revolution.
But that was then, and this is now. Pardon me for saying this, but in 2021 the Eclipse-based Notes client seems like a bit of an irrelevance: a sledgehammer to crack a nut, a sumo wrestler trying to dance the fandango. Except that, if you want to run traditional Domino applications, you need the Notes client. Most people are not working underground, in the middle of the ocean, or in other locations where they can’t get a reliable internet connection. And so the obvious way to provision business applications to the rest of us in the 21st century is via a web browser.
Which brings us to the upcoming release of HCL Nomad Web. Nomad Web is the product that allows you to run traditional Notes applications, (mostly) unaltered, in a standard browser. It’s also the product that we all wish that IBM could have launched in the late 2000s (Netflix started moving its business model from shipping DVDs to online streaming in 2007). To be fair, the technology didn’t really exist, or at least was not as easily available, back then. In any case, Nomad Web is currently in beta, and is scheduled to ship with Domino v12, i.e. in the first half of 2021.
To IBM’s credit, it has had a go at this before, with the Notes 9 Browser Plugin, launched in 2015. But that required a monster browser plugin (basically most of the Notes client itself) to be installed prior to being able to launch a Notes app. Which sort of defeats the object of moving to the browser in the first place.
There’s a lot to like about HCL’s approach with Nomad Web. First, it doesn’t require a plugin or any software to be pre-installed. Second, it uses a couple of newer technologies (one reason IBM couldn’t pull this off earlier) that really help with run time performance. Web Assembly is a low level, fast, portable language (OK, technically a “binary instruction format”) that lets you run applications inside a number of different browsers (hint: not IE!) and is much, much faster than Javascript. HCL has used Web Assembly, combined with WebGL, a high performance graphics API, to effectively provide all the bits of the Notes client that you need to run your Notes apps in the browser itself. So as well as being able to run your Notes apps, there are additional benefits, such as the fact that the dialog boxes have a more modern look and feel.
Long story short: it’s like magic. You can run your Notes apps in a browser, without pre-installing any software at all.
There are some limitations to the types of applications that you can run. For example, Nomad Web doesn’t support client side Java or XPages. It also requires you to have set up an ID Vault. There’s more good news when it comes to licensing. The intention, according to HCL, is to include Nomad Web in the CCB license price. So no additional cost to make the magic happen.
The beta for Nomad Web is open now. To register your interest, fill out the survey here, and be sure to check the box labeled “Web/Browser (Nomad running in a browser)“ under question 6. If you want to really delve into the detail of all this, check out this video by the very excellent Thomas Hampel, who explains everything.
And if you have questions about Nomad Web, or any aspect of modernizing your Notes/Domino application infrastructure, click below to start a conversation. We love to chat!