Slate

Last week announcement of Hannover - the version 8 of Lotus Notes, @ Edbrill.com has been widely appreciated by the bloggers.
This release would be a major revamp of the software to provide a paradigm shift in Collaboration & Messaging Software domain. Hannover is intended to push IBM's Activity centric collaboration model. Which is quite different from the current email/inbox and related but unconnected documents that resides in multiple Lotus NSF Databases.
IBM has also taken this opportunity to provide a highly modern look for the Software which is something the Lotus community has been missing for long.

This step from IBM for one is to halt any migration away from Lotus for usability reasons. In many such migration cases, Users have cited Lotus Notes as begin a non-standard client, primarily due to its decade old-look.

The underling platform for Lotus Notes client software is also changed with this release, and it will be based on Eclipse RPC code base. But right from version 6.5 IBM has introduce API enhancements to support prior version applications in eclipse based Hannover. This is what IBM calls as composite applications.

Though its a very encouraging move from IBM, there is a huge community of Lotus Developers and Partners, who are providing consultancy and application based on Lotus technology. So what this new interface means to them?

There are many questions that would be answered as more material is available from IBM on Hannover, but these are my understanding on Hannover release.

1. The Lotus Notes Mail/Calendaring features will be only eclipse based initially. These same interface components as we see for the email views/perspectives will not be available for Developers to use in their Notes Application.
2. Hannover is only a Client enhancement release, and Lotus Designer will continue to provide the existing interface for Views/Outlines/Forms and other Notes application components
3. Customizing of Mail/Calendaring features as possible in current Mail Templates will not be possible; or atleast they will require high understanding of eclipse classes.
4. The Hannover Mail features will be based on POP3 architecture by default like MS Outlook, connecting to Domino Server for POP3 services and will use Derby database engine for local storage of Email/Calendaring documents.

Inshort, it is a Workplace rich-client for messaging rebranded as Lotus Notes which will continue to support Lotus Notes databases as composite applications, but will not support for long the Notes programming model (Formula, LS, RAD, etc).

These are my understanding of how things are or might be, and need not be taken as something Official from the Vendor.

It was pleasant to read @ Ed Brill on IBM's plan for Lotus Notes 8 code named "Hannover".
The planned design for the version ahead are great, fabulous. It also demonstrates IBM’s strategy for Eclipse based rich client Workplace.

Can’t wait for this launch. Hats-off for Ed and the team. :)

At last the Season 2005 starts to look bright for Ferrari/Schumi. After disappointing races this year, Schumi is P2 on Grid at Montreal Circuit. P1 is for BAR's Jenson Button who also did not had a very good Year as compared to 2004. So the grid now looks like the last years with Button and Schumi up ahead.

This also gives an advantage for Schumi to be on Podium. But there is always this danger of some one crashing into the Ferrari and spoiling all the good chance.

As noted in one of my earlier post , most of the friends in my group has written off Schumi as Old & Junk. And I just need one win for Ferrari to laugh back at them.

So this is the race to watch out!!!

Last so many days were spent on Code Review and Unit Testing for my current project application. I see Code Review as a very important & fruitful exercise. It helps removing many bugs by just following code and those which may not come up in testing, as Test Cases are not always exhaustive for each and every condition. By doing a code review you can mentally test each programming constructs and paths.

Testing brings to surface some very peculiar issues and which makes you hate LN (my project is still for R5). Lotus free form structure for storage is a boon as well as a bane. While it helps rapid development without the need to bother about relational constraints and data structure normalization, but this sometimes leads to issues when Data Integrity is of concern. The behavior of various NotesObjects and their methods which are based on the FT Index are unpredictable unlike RDBMS where you are assured of a consistent implementation. Index update delays or In-memory objects statuses can lead you to bang your head against the Screen figuring out the problem reasons.

So here I have lot of my code using NotesView.getDocumentByKey methods to put basic referential integrity among related data. Yeah a RDBMS would have been a best option here, but as pointed out in the earlier post - Code Works, one of the objective was to reuse the in-place setup of Lotus Workflow/Notes and thus minimize investment costs.

Now we have checks at various places to not allow data duplication if those records with matching keywords exist. This works in ideal situations, situations where after every document delete/update you give Notes sufficient time to update its Index or cache or whatever it is. But our test cases failed when we deleted document and immediately in the same session created new records. So our hidden views, used by getDocumentByKey are not getting immediately refreshed. Even closing all application windows won't work. So is this Indexing problem? Tweaking any View/DB property won't help. And when we restart Notes after deleting documents, the validation works. So is this Notes client cache problem? But these methods don't have any "Nocache" attribute.

Trial and error and we used NotesDatabase.search for these checks instead of NotesView.getDocumentByKey and this works for any kind of monkey-usage of the application. And we had no problem here with View Index or cache or whatever it is. But theres issue of App. performance using this method. Ashish suggested of using NotesView.Refresh before invoking the getDocument methods. Now this method is suppose to update your NotesView objects with the datastore image during the same code process, so any further modifications/reference has access to the current document copies/count. But in my case I am performing a process, close & restart my application and then deleting/updating some documents manually to create Test conditions and again running the code process to repeat the earlier action. This ideally means all my variables/objects are destroyed & recreated - an if recreated then they are suppose to be representing the latest datastore state.

But it worked. A combination of NotesView.refresh and NotesView.getDocumentbykey gives you the current state of data. So this was a case of in-memory objects getting cached for the session. But why can't we have application session which destroys all in-memory objects as soon as when application is out of scope without having to restart Notes or doing manual Object destroy.

I had taken this Survey on Lotus Developer Domain some days back, and thought posting it here, but then few events got me completely occupied. So today to post a weblog on this, I went to the LDD to collect the survey link but could not find it on the homepage or any where else. Instinctively, I used the search on the Site using various combinations of keywords but I could not get any result pointing me to the right document. But then even though IBM Site has thousands of web pages and content articles, the Web Site search facility is still primitive. Probably still based only on Keyword count in Full Text. After some tries, I realized I should be using Google for this need. @ Google I gave this search Toolbar usability Survey Lotus and Volla! the first link was to the document @ LDD that I was looking for.

If you are a Lotus User/Developer or Partner, I suggest do give your feedback on the Usability survey that these people are seeking out. It might help the chap at the other end collect the data he/she is looking for and probably do something fruitful on the Lotus Notes GUI.

Link: Toolbar and Template Usage Survey

Couple of questions on this suvery makes me wonder what these chaps are looking to know about. Haven't these things had already been tried and tested in the MS Office Suite. So why Lotus trying to re-invent the wheel. If you want to make Lotus look like a Standard software, then give it the native look & feel of the Operating System it runs on. Make it work the way the Office Suite for that OS works.