What is Domino Web Access?

2005-07-03T21:40:00.000-07:00

Domino Web Access is a "rich" Web experience on top of the standard Notes mail template. Yes, the name is somewhat misleading, as the product really only offers access to the data within a Domino user's mail file (not to all Domino Web applications). However, it adds personal contacts (which for Notes users typically resides within a separate personal address book database) and Notebook (what Notes calls the Journal) to the mail file as well, so it is technically a bit more than Mail, Calendar and To Do's. It used to have a much more interesting and original name--iNotes Web Access, and was often referred to (and still is by some) as iNotes for short.

For those not familiar with Domino, it is a mature collaboration platform/server which includes many distinct services (ie, mail services, directory services, http services, etc.). Domino may be best known as a competitor to Exchange--Microsoft's mail platform. Unlike Exchange, it is a product which supports many different platforms (Win32, Linux, AIX, Solaris, OS/390, AS/400), and excels at data replication, rapid application development and a database which supports non-rigid schemas.

A little history
Domino Web Access started out as a showcase or poster child for rich Web experiences (and has continued to be just this). The original release of iNotes shipped with Domino 5.0.8 (July 2001). Our goal was to muddy the water between a Win32 application and a Web application. It was nice to see that some recognized that it was way ahead of it's time. It won the 2001 Network Computing Well-connected award for "Best Web-Based Application."

At the time this project first got off the ground (Spring/Summer of 1999), I was the lead architect for the Lotus Organizer product--another awesome product (which I continue to use today...and hopefully will get an opportunity to write more about in a future post). The original prototype was for a "Web PIM" which used a Notes/Domino NSF as the datastore.

The effort started when Lotus management allowed me to spend a couple of months prototyping this "Web PIM", to show off the rich UI experience that might be achieved with the new generation of browsers. IE was the revolutionary browser at the time--exposing many new and exciting concepts like the innerHTML property to dynamically change the content of any portion of a web page. This was something I had wanted to do ever since seeing a Microsoft evangelist (I wish I could remember his name) show off the capabilities of the "Trident" engine--the new rendering engine which was to be in IE4.

The goal of the prototype was to implement "Web" versions of some Lotus Organizer UI. The first thing I got working was a date navigator. Organizer has a prominent date navigator which had multiple purposes:
- Provided and easy way to view a calendar (what date is next Friday)
- Allowed a way to traverse pages within any calendar view or jump to a specific date within the calendar.
Getting this to look just like it did in Organizer was a challenge. Win32 had many GDI calls to allow you to do all sorts of complex graphical rendering. Designing the same UI using HTML elements and CSS was challenging, but once you got the hang of this, it became aparent that this was indeed possible (with some caveats and a bit more difficulty). Getting something working (but not with the right visual polish) was actually in many cases much easier than getting this to work by writing C code.

The other challenge was the nature of interpreted vs. compiled languages and the lack of quality of the existing javascript debugger. Unlike compiled languages like C/C++ with very sophisticated compilers and debuggers, JavaScript is an interpreted language. With interpreted languages, errors typically aren't discovered til runtime.

Fairly soon, I had a prototype of a Calendar Month view and a contacts section. IE5 had a new feature called XML islands and Domino 5.0.x now had some Java view applets which were communicating with the server using a new Domino XML command ?ReadViewEntries. I decided to exploit this invisible HTML element to achieve the same server interactions the applet was doing. (XML islands were actually the precursor to the much heralded XMLHttpRequest object. In IE, XMLHttpRequest use requires ActiveX be enabled--XML Islands will work event with ActiveX disabled at the browser).

Here are a couple of earlier articles I helped write on lessons learned from DWA:
Exploting Dynamic HTML: Lessons from iNotes Web Access
Using Domino data in Web applications: XML Lessons from iNotes

The first article actually has some pictures of the original WebPIM prototype which I resurrected and modified a bit for the article.

Also, here's an interview before we released the first version of iNotes:
Jason Dumont and Vinod Seraphin on iNotes Web Access

Coincidentally, at the time we were developing the prototype, Lotus had a lot of resources working on a browser-based applications suite called eSuite. The only problem was that this was all Java-based. Java in the browser wasn't panning out and the size of the downloads to use these applications pretty much insured this wasn't going to gain widespread adoption. As I started showing folks the prototype and the richness and responsiveness possible within the browser, everyone concluded that the richness was on par with the Java applets being built for eSuite, but with superior performance and a lighter memory footprint. Needless to say, eSuite's days were numbered.

To this day we have yet to see Java really take off on the desktop (although it has become rather accepted as a server language). Meanwhile, rich Internet applications have become much more common and popular. DWA has added more features in subsequent releases and is now widely deployed by Domino customers.

If you're not familiar with DWA and want to give it a try...IBM developerworks (formerly notes.net) hosts a demo site.

Who Am I

2005-06-25T20:15:00.000-07:00

I'm a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM, working on Web applications. I'm presently the lead architect for Domino Web Access (more on this later), and also involved in some of the Portal and Workplace efforts at IBM. Prior to IBM, I worked at Data General, Access Technology, Lotus and Iris Associates. The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

From Dumb Terminals to Win32 to DHTML
I started my career out of school at Data General. Data General was a wonderful place to work in the mid 1980s. I worked on the user interface to an office automation product called CEO (Comprehensive Electronic Office). This product competed with Digital's All-In-One and IBM's PROFs. It ran on DG's MV-class minicomputers. I eventually moved over to a group working on PC integration into CEO, and began playing with Microsoft Windows 1.0. This eventually lead to a project named "CEO Object Office", which was based on an Object-oriented UI for Windows from Hewlett Packard called "New Wave".

I eventually left Data General after six years as I wanted to go from a "hardware" company to one more focused on "software". I was hired at Access Technology as the Windows expert to help get a new spreadsheet product refocused from UNIX and X-Windows to PCs and Microsoft Windows. After Computer Associates acquired Access, I decided it was time to leave and left for Lotus.

In December of 1991, I joined what was at that time the remnants of the Lotus Agenda team. Lotus acquired Organizer from a U.K. company named Threadz, Ltd. shortly after I joined. I then worked with the 3 principals at Threadz and a small team of folks at Lotus to put out Lotus Organizer 1.0. I continued working on Lotus Organizer, eventually becoming it's lead architect.

In the late 1990's I became very interested in the Web and this led to a small add-on product for Lotus Organizer named Lotus Organizer Web Calendar. It was a CGI-based program which provided the ability to manipulate Lotus Organizer files which were out on a file server.

In 1999, I began experimenting with some of the newer browser capabilities Microsoft had added to IE 4 and IE5 and became hooked on DHTML. I built a prototype called the "WebPIM" prototype which showcased some of the rich Web page updates and XML retrieval capabilities possible with IE5. The work caught the interest of some folks at Iris, and an effort to build a next generation Web Mail experience for Lotus Notes was born and I transferred to Iris Associates. The product leveraged many of the Web page generation capabilities added to Domino as part of the Quickplace product and made it's debut with Domino 5.0.8 (in July 2001), as "iNotes Web Access". The product has had a name change since and is now known as "Domino Web Access".

I've been the lead architect for this product and over the last couple of years also had some lead roles on the Common PIM Portlets, a set of portlets that offer a simple Portal based UI which support one of several backend mail systems.

Vinod's Blog: Domino Web Access, DHTML, Collaboration and the Internet

What is Domino Web Access?

Who Am I