Unless you’ve been living under a large (sandstone) rock, you’ll know that IT service and consulting company HCL Technologies acquired most of what was previously known as the IBM collaboration solutions suite of products in July 2019. That suite, of course, includes the Notes and Domino products, Connections, Verse, Sametime and so on. We’ve written before about why that acquisition is a good thing in our opinion, and it’s mostly because of HCL’s commitment to a relentless pursuit of product innovation.
One of the key areas where this product innovation is being applied also happens to be an area of specific interest to us: application development. The Notes/Domino platform is, at its heart, an application platform. The applications that it’s best known for, mail and calendaring are, after all, just Notes apps themselves. And we’ve spent the last 20+ years building tools for and interacting with the Notes developer community. So we like to think we know a thing or two about Notes appdev. We’ve watched our favorite appdev platform change hands from Lotus to IBM, and now to HCL. So we feel somewhat qualified to opine about the strategic direction of the platform.
Right now, we like what we see, but it hasn’t always been thus. Things started to go pear-shaped back in 2004 with the introduction of IBM Workplace 2.0 and the “dual lane highway.” Customers started to become concerned that Workplace would replace Notes, which resulted in IBM attempting to integrate Workplace into Notes. (Or was it the other way around?) In any case, by 2007 Workplace had fizzled, but left behind the poisoned chalice of Eclipse and the whole Expeditor architecture. As recently as 2016, even the great Volker Weber said: “I would not know how to fix this.”
In the two years since HCL has been responsible for Notes/Domino product development, they’ve developed and started to implement a strategy to “fix” the platform, in two key areas. First, the elderly, proprietary and over-complex application development environment could use some modernization. And secondly, the elderly, proprietary and over-complex fat Notes client could also benefit from going on a diet, not to mention mobile-enablement. I’ll explain HCL’s approach to those two issues in reverse order, starting with the client.
Enter stage left HCL Nomad. Initially viewed as somewhat of a proof-of-concept, Nomad represented a bold and unexpected step forward for the platform, showing traditional Notes applications running (mostly) unchanged on an Apple iPad. And, Nomad turned out to be much more than vapor-ware. The POC turned into a shipping product, and as of early October, the beta program for Nomad running on iPhone and Android has begun. (Sign up for it here.) But wait, there’s more. HCL is using Web Assembly technology to enable the Nomad client to work on just about any browser. That’s a pretty convincing thin client strategy for supporting traditional Notes applications on almost any platform.
So what about the development environment? Here, HCL is breaking its approach into two approaches for two different audiences. There’s the “pro-code” approach, which appears to be based on providing support for Javascript and Node.JS developers to access Domino data via the Appdev Pack. Then there’s the “lo-code” approach, which aims to get back to Notes’ roots by enabling business/power users to build simple applications with low-to-no coding required.
One of the many products that has passed hands from IBM to HCL is what used to be called IBM Forms Experience Builder. It now has a much snappier title: HCL Leap (for “Lightweight Enterprise APps). In its current iteration, Leap is a forms builder and simple workflow engine for building web apps atop Websphere Application Server. But HCL has embarked on a project (Project Sandstone) to port Leap to the Domino environment, creating a simple way for non-technical users to create forms based web apps based on the Domino database and application server. HCL says that Leap for Domino will go into beta around the time that Domino 11 is launched, but in the mean time you can play in the Leap Sandbox here (registration required).
So what will happen to Domino Designer and all your traditional Notes apps? Nothing, according to HCL. This will be an alternative way of building web and mobile apps on Domino and you’ll still be able to build and maintain your older applications using Designer.
To our way of thinking, HCL has laid out the most cohesive and convincing strategy for application development for Notes and Domino that we’ve seen for years. If they can pull it off (hint: they are starting to build a reputation for delivering on their promises), then this could be the boost that the Notes/Domino platform has needed for decades.
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