Of things to come

I came across a neat article on the Ruby Programming language from "beyond Java" on OnJava.com. Check it out at

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2005/11/16/ruby-the-rival.html
http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2005/10/19/challenging-java-dominance.html

I think too many frameworks and complexity are playing against Java web development.
Java has been around for so many years, developers are still trying to simplify some of the things. New initiatives like Hibernate are providing some relief.

Its a miracle, that even after so many years of webism we don't have rapid application development for web applications considering at the least 55% of the tasks involved in all the projects are almost the same. Input , Data Validation , Persistence, workflow and Presentation.

There has not been one web development technology (in open source) that can be used to will let the developer query , store and display data to and from a database.RubyOnRails may be the answer to prayers of many in the open source world.

If you get a chance check out the video demo on their site. Its an excellent start if not anything else.

Lotus Notes - Its that email thing right...

Whenever I talk to IT folks on the 'other' side, they usually have that little smirk and ask "you develop applications with Lotus Notes? Is it not just email??'. I have heard similar remarks from IT veterans with more 10 years in the industry? I wonder Why this is so?

I guess, one of the main reasons is that Lotus Notes is unique compared to other products/languages/applications in the IT World. For example, if you understand MS SQL Server , you already have some idea about the capabilities of Oracle , MySQL etc. Lotus Notes seems to be very unique in this aspect, there is no other product that can be compared to it directly. Its hard for software developers to understand Lotus Notes if they have never been exposed to it!

Notes has also been more of a corporate tool , not within the reach of regular developers. Lotus Notes also does not seem to play a huge role in schools like VB etc.

Even companies which have Lotus Notes do not take utilize it to the maximum.
For example they might invest in creating a big online forum when they could accomplish the same with a discussion database! Some of these decisions are not based on technical requirements but are due to lack of knowledge about Lotus Notes and its features.

In the next coming days/weeks I will try to give an overview of what Lotus Notes is and what can it can do for your business.

Lotus Notes Email Integration in Websphere Portal

This is a topic of much confusion. I did not find any article on developerworks/Infocenter that clearly talks about the various options, So I will make an attempt to clear it up a little bit.

In WPS 5.1 , there are three ways to bring in collaboration
a) LotusNotes View Portlet
b) Domino Web Access (iNotes)
c) Common Mail Portlet (Part of the PIM Personal Information Management Portlets)

Assuming you have confgiured everything else correctly*, Let us look at each one separately.

Lotus Notes View Portlet
This is probably one of the earlier and easiest method of setting up a mail portlet. The two cool things about this portlet is that it supports People Awareness and 'Launch in Lotus Notes' option. This portlet also respects the theme settings of the portal to some extent. But this is a very basic mail porltet and does not allow access to mail folders (other than InBox) by default.You can setup mail , Calendar or ToDo by just changing the PropertyType of the portlet.

Domino Web Access (iNotes)
This portlet is just a IFrame to iNotes. It's very close in functionality to the Lotus Notes mail client and even supports encrypted mail. Since its a IFrame, the themes and skins of the portal do not apply to this portlet.It will display with its coffee brown color no matter what you have for a theme and customizing the look of iNotes it not an easy thing to do.

Common Mail Portlet
This is a new portlet that has a common look and feel no matter what email system you use (Exchange , Lotus Notes) and is new with Websphere Portal 5.1. I have not worked with this myself but there is a nice article on the following page with some screen shots:Configuring PIM. One of the key differences is that this portlet has some of the functionality of iNotes (access to folders etc) and also respects the themes and skins of the portal.

*You can check Single SignOn to your Domino Servers by
a) Login to Portal
b) Replace the URL in your browser with the URL to your Domino mail file
You should be able to view your mail file without having to authenticate with your Domino server.

Hello !

Im late in the game...but just wanted to give this blogging thing a quick try.You will find my ramblings on Lotus Domino , Websphere Portal (just started playing with this one) and other basic needs of a human being like the Creative MuVo Micro MP3 player.