Ferris: More About Lotus Composite Applications

Another timely reality check from Nick Shelness – his summary:

What concerns Ferris is that:

• While composite applications can add value to Notes applications by allowing end users to interact with data in multiple Notes and non-Notes repositories, there is very little (if any) additional Notes functionality being delivered to Notes developers. Does this mean that IBM views Notes/Domino as a “legacy environment,” rather than as a first-level RAD platform? IBM says one thing, and then appears to do another (first Workplace, now Component Applications).
• Notes development for Notes client and browser access was once unified — a Notes Navigator, View, Form, etc., had a similar Notes client and a Web manifestation. Yes some tailoring, by adding HTML fragments, was possible, but this was icing and not cake. IBM has now fragmented Notes/Domino development with separate approaches for Notes clients (Composite Applications) and the Web (Xpages). Ferris believes that if IBM wishes to signal that Notes/Domino is not a “legacy environment” ripe for replacement by Microsoft offerings, it urgently needs a road map that describes how it will reunify Notes/Domino development for Notes Clients and the Web, and then execute to it.
• At one point Lotus Notes/Domino possessed many advantages over Microsoft Outlook/Exchange/SharePoint; for example, shared-nothing redundancy, rapid email dial-tone after a failure, etc. Microsoft has now caught up, and in some areas surpassed Lotus. The two areas in which Lotus still possesses an advantage are: the ability to take documents offline and resynchronize them at a later date (SharePoint currently lacks such a facility), and RAD. IBM needs to bolster this RAD capability if it wishes to protect its Notes/Domino franchise.

Via Duffbert, where there’s an interesting comment thread on the topic

More About Lotus Composite Applications