1Ed Maloney  11/16/2009 8:56:36 AM  Notes... the SQL

Agreed. This has been a long standing limitation of the product that has been ignored, or addressed through partial solutions like DECS, LEI, Notes/DB2 and LSX. It has always been possible to incorporate RDBMS data in Notes, it just shouldn't be this difficult. We need a native SQL GUI tool and a 'data grid' component to display the results. Take a quick look at Lotus Approach and you'll see what Notes is missing. We should not have to create a custom solution for this extremely common requirement. Notes has lost out on many internal projects at my organization because of this issue.

  2Darren Duke  11/16/2009 9:44:26 AM  @1, that subject made me chortle

Yes there are lots of "workarounds", but like you said, look at Approach.

@All, go vote the IdeaJam up.

  3Darren Duke  11/16/2009 9:46:17 AM  @1, that subject made me chortle

Or to put it another way.....

Now that Domino Designer is "free", we need to "free Domino Designer".

  4Peter Presnell  11/16/2009 9:52:57 AM  I agree 100%

Great post Darren. I especially like the point you make about these people living outside the yellow bubble and not drinking the yellow kool-aide on a regular basis.

Based upon my own (similar) conversations I would add the additional need to make Notes appear to be a little more relational (i.e. join Notes views to each other or Notes views to relational tables). Most people in IT departments seem to switch off when you tell then you cant join Notes data.

  5tom oneil  11/16/2009 12:03:35 PM  I disagree

I'm sorry. I work in one of those "re-platforming" groups that is taking Lotus Notes applications and converting them to .NET. I've done C# programming for close to four years now (or is it longer?).

None of our C# (ASP.NET) applications use the .NET data gimmicks that Microsoft has sold us. We create C# code to talk to the backend databases. We generate objects and bind them to repeaters, datagrids, etc...

This dream of drag and drop objects are not worth Lotus' time.

On the bright side... the push to "re-platform" applications has pretty much ceased. I'm getting new requests for applications all the time. I tell people they can either wait 4-6 months for a system with a relation backend or they can have a new Notes system in a week or two. People usually pick Notes :-)

  6Bhavya K Jain  11/16/2009 1:45:39 PM  Nice post

Great post Darren.

agree with the post and the comments :)

  7Wayne A Sobers  11/16/2009 1:57:11 PM  Missing SQL ?

The only place where I find I miss SQL is in creating reports. I generally build a view to house my reports and summaries and then run the reporting tool on that.

The aggregate functions in SQL turn five pages of loops and look ups into five lines of code, and that is certainly easier to maintain.

I was one of those who thought that not having joins would be a barrier to development, but seeing the speed at which development can be done can change minds.

In all, prototyping a system is much faster in Notes than in other systems, but Notes still has catchup to do in widget display (multi-column list box) and keyboard control (enter key to move from field to field).

  8John Mackey  11/16/2009 2:44:12 PM  I second that!

Great post! I totally agree...obviously :-)

As soon as SQL is mentioned as a requirement for a project, even if it's only a small part of the project such as a lookup to a table, it becomes an uphill battle to sell mgmt. on using Domino Designer as the tool.

I hear what Tom (@5) is saying, so perhaps they can give us drag and drop "data gimmicks" just like Microsoft markets and domino developers will need to do the heavy lifting and code the backend db interface. At least then we can also say Domino Designer does SQL out of the box too. Of course this is not what I really want but it would at least level the playing field.

-John

  9Darren Duke  11/16/2009 2:55:23 PM  Some clarification

@5, I'm glad to hear the worm has turned for your organization. I wish I would hear it more often. All too often I hear something like, "we'll do it in Notes until our .NET guys get free/get trained/get up to speed/finish the current project". I want it to be "We'll do it in Notes". Period. For all organizations.

@5 & @7, while I agree that sometimes Notes is just better (indeed at STS there is a joe that I always answer, "Notes can do that"), I feel that we'd get a lot more traction with XPages if, as Notes developers, we are able to surface other systems' data with the speed with which we can do with Notes data.

I always makes me smirk when I hear other "enterprise developers" bitching about security and ORM. As I have always said, Notes developers can get a project out of the door before the others have done the MS Project. Now, wouldn't it be a stellar kick in the balls if we could do that with their data too? I can hear their jaws dropping now! I would seem that with more "promotes" today for John's original idea that I'm not alone.

  10Seng Chye  11/19/2009 2:35:26 AM  The missing link: Data Grid

Can't agree better with you guys.

Lotus please get this done ASAP. There nothing for IBM Lotus to lose if NSF can access data outside Notes via XPage, QV, DataGrid, etc. In fact, this is going to create a big upper hand & market advantage to the competitors.

To add the inability of Embedded Views to access other NSF views using @Formula or Scripts is also very demoting to Lotus Notes Domino.

These has been left unattended by IBM Lotus for far too long.