Richard Pajerski Software development and consulting

Be they public, private or the newly-minted "Partner-led" clouds, one message HCL is making clear is that the future for the newly-acquired IBM collaboration product portfolio will be all about the cloud.  Richard Jefts (General Manager, HCL Digital Solutions) has just published here on the new approach: Update on HCL Acquisition of IBM Collaboration Portfolio (Edit March 2021: Update on HCL Acquisition of IBM Collaboration Portfolio).

It appears that the biggest impact will be on current SmartCloud Notes users who will now need to transition away from that offering to one of the new HCL cloud models.  In practice, that will probably entail some form of migration back to a traditional, on-premises Domino/Portal solution (or Domino/Portal-hosted partner solution).  Those who currently run on-premises applications and solutions, including Verse, will (likely) not be immediately affected.

It's good to hear mail will continue to be a core area for Domino; however, the "for the foreseeable future" is an interesting qualification that suggests it may not be for long.  The tight integration of email within collaborative Notes/Domino applications won't go away but will loosen up as different messaging providers take over the role of Notes mail clients.  HCL's announcement here is not surprising (or at least not shocking) and I think it strikes the right balance between managing what works well today on-premises and where much new development will be going forward: cloud.

Having developed with Java for a number of years in various environments (Notes/Domino, Tomcat, ActiveMQ,  Android, desktop, etc.), I was initially skeptical when I read this article and watched the video about the recently-improved Eclipse OpenJ9: https://developer.ibm.com/videos/introduction-to-eclipse-openj9-and-adoptopenjdknet/

Yes, Java has incrementally improved over time but the claims here seemed a bit over the top.  To think I might get both noticeably faster startup *and* up to 50% memory reduction just by switching to J9 seemed to be a bit too optimistic.  But after downloading (adoptopenjdk.net) and giving it a spin, I was not disappointed.

Sure enough, out-of-the-box startup time for Netbeans 8.2 on Windows 8.1 increased dramatically against Oracle Java 1.8.0_191 (running quad-core I7 on SSD).  There was no point in taking measurements -- it was up and ready in three seconds!  This didn't seem possible with Netbeans but there it was.  Everything worked the same as before ... only faster.  Then the real shocker: RAM usage went from roughly 650M down to 268!  Huh?  If I can eliminate that much RAM usage for hosted server side deployments, it's going to translate into real cash savings.

On top of the performance upgrade and memory savings, I immediately noticed that Swing is visually better in J9 than OpenJDK [edit: with the HotSpot VM].  In particular, the default font rendering is really nice!  In the past, OpenJDK has generally lagged behind Oracle Java for desktop applications and still does; but to my eyes, J9 is now at visual parity with Oracle (or perhaps better).

I realize that the J9 has been the JVM in Notes/Domino all these years but I've never attempted to benchmark it against other JVMs since IBM never really promoted it as a JDK for Windows.  I'm currently using 9.0.1 FP10 which uses build 8.0.5.21 of J9:

Hopefully, IBM can manage to get the latest J9 into an upcoming fixpack.  I sure have lots of Notes and Domino Java code that could benefit from it.

A big congratulations and thank you to Mark Stoodley and all the other engineers and players behind this release!

Among the areas getting attention in the upcoming release of Domino 10 is the data store.  As part of making Domino more bullet-proof, removing the 64GB limit on the NSF size is planned and will be a fantastic improvement.  Naturally, this is going to put more emphasis on overall database scalability.  As Domino gets more scalable, I think it's going to need a feature that many of us have been seeking for some time: multi-document ACID transactions.

Being able to save two or more documents as a single transaction cannot currently be done natively in Domino.  The best we can get is saving all of the fields associated with a single document using NotesDocument.Save: the operation either succeeds or fails.  This is fine for most Notes/Domino applications but there are a number of cases where having a transactional save across multiple documents is desirable.  A simple work order system where multiple, related tasks are attached to a main work order request is an obvious example.  Implementing each task as a separate document is an intuitive approach and can simplify programming of such a system.

MongoDB 4.0 recently introduced multi-document transactions.  And although Domino doesn't directly compete with MongoDB or other NoSQL databases, as it begins to scale, it's nonetheless going to need to act more like them.

What do you think?

IBM has announced a multi-year investment in Notes Domino with a major new release (Notes 10) coming out in 2018. The investment will include closely-related products such as Notes Traveler, IBM Sametime and IBM Verse.

Specific product details are scant at the moment but it's encouraging to see IBM laying out a long-term roadmap for Notes and Domino and broadcasting a commitment to protecting its clients' investments. Also, the new direction allows IBM partners to hope for commercial stability for these products for the foreseeable future. Overall, I'm optimistic about this announcement.

However, the partnership with HCL Technologies for future development raises some questions. Will HCL Technologies be able to innovate the way that Iris Associates once did? Is this merely a cost-cutting measure or does IBM no longer have the internal talent to take Notes/Domino into the future (or both)?

More here:
https://www.ibm.com/blogs/social-business/2017/10/25/ibm-announces-investment-notes-domino-version-10-beyond/

See "IBM Domino Community Server for Non-Production Environments" here: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/develop/collaboration/

This is the full Domino server product available at no charge. However, the restrictions are:
1) You have to select the "Utility Server" option (no mail).
2) It may only be used for testing applications in a non-production environment.

The latest feature pack (FP9 as of September 15, 2017) is also available for download.

*** July 2019 Update ***  Domino Community Server version 10.0.1 FP2: https://www.ibm.com/account/reg/us-en/signup?formid=urx-33713