Mike Golding: Today I'm writing ASP
by Volker Weber
Mike Golding of notestips.com reports:
... as I start work building another web reporting portal, I began to think that ASP might be a better and faster way to get the summary data from the three different systems I required the data from.
To be honest it was very simple and everything, especially when dealing with Domino, was like coding in LotusScript. I was surprised. In less than an hour I had an ASP page that contained live data from Oracle, SQL Server and and several Domino databases on one page.
So far, so good. And here is the part that should wake up a few marketing heads at IBM:
I was really quite impressed by the speed, ease and consistency of it all. It's a far cry from J2EE and considering the similarities to LotusScript maybe ASP.Net is better transition for Domino developers thanWebSphere Lotus Workplace or J2EE.
If existing developers with Mike's deep knowledge can't get the work done with IBM's tools, the end is near.
Comments
The IBM Domino Toolkit for Domino should allow you a JSP Tag approach to write JSP Tag only (look Ma no Java code) integration. Theoradically... It only runs on Websphere (not on Tomcat) and it requires WSAD (Eclipse is not enough). When Garnet was shelved I thought LotusScript (that could be used to do JSP there) would resurface in Websphere as a scripting extension, so you could migrate ASP to Websphere.
Today I see 2 alternatives to migrating to ASP. Go directly to ASP.NET and use Proposition ASPEN/N2N or use OXF (www.orbeon.com) and use XML. We just write the Domino processors for OXF.
:-) stw
I guess I need to go over to NotesTips to comment on this...
the main thing is that the app dev part of the Lotus Workplace story is the area where we still have a lot of "coming soon" items. WSAD 5.1 has some of it, WebSphere Portal 5 has some of it, but more is coming in '04. It's -not- at the point yet where a Domino developer can make that seamless transition... but headed in that direction.
Of course you can do that in a J2EE environment using Java - but you need a lot of knolledge about each datasource you what to access. Acsessing domino is complete different from accessing databases via JDBC or accessing SAP ...
Even if you use JSP-Tags you have to use a special taglib for every datasource ...
What is needed is ONE JSP Taglib to access EACH datasource with the same set of simple tags.
WebTML was designed to solve exactly that problem (see
http://www2.innovationgate.de/WebGatePublisher/wga-developer-center/html/default/wsci-5lcvb7.en.0)
As always you need to know the software & systems you want to work with. It is not a problem at all to integrate a Domino database - or a SQL db - into a JSP or a servlet within a hour. But that is only of part of the story. The other thing is the presentation of the data. JSPs are a good technology to do that.
I agree that the Domino Toolkit is far away from what you would call excellent or at least really useful. Also true that it's a plugin for WSAD. But the basic technoloy is a custom JSP tag library and this is a good approach to hide/encapsulate access code from web designers. I'm not sure but is it really true that this tag library does not work with Tomcat ? I can't believe that. It's a standard tag library ...
