But Notes still has many idiosyncrasies and design limitations that can be directly attributed to its 15-year-old proprietary architecture. Seasoned Notes developers have built valuable expertise in working around these limitations and made a career out of their Notes and Domino skills. But today it is no longer Lotus Notes, but rather J2EE, WebSphere, and WebSphere Portal that are the new IBM technology darlings.

If you are a Notes developer and your company hires a team of fresh Java talent to work on WebSphere projects while excluding you, I would be quite worried if I were you. You can always try to make the case that developing the same application in Notes would be a much better choice because it will be five times faster to implement. But it seems that developer productivity and the ability to work closely with the business are no longer driving IT decisions these days.

I have been following the heated debate about the future of Domino on the different forums and blogs. What I find most interesting about this debate is that developers tend to think that their survival in the job market depends on the survival of the technology that they have invested so many years to master. The sad truth is that Notes jobs are on the decline and WebSphere jobs are on the rise. So the survival of Notes as an application development platform is clearly not what Notes professionals should bank their careers on. The move of a million developers to standards-based application development is inevitable, if quite painful.

While IBM has done a very good job at marketing WebSphere, it has done very little so far to help the Notes/Domino community make the transition to WebSphere. From a developer perspective, there is almost nothing in common between the Notes and J2EE development models. It's like comparing apples and oranges. This means a steep learning curve and - especially for collaborative/workflow applications - a significant loss of productivity. Notes is a much higher-level application development model. Using the Domino Designer, in no time you can create a database, forms, and views to access documents created with these forms. In contrast, with J2EE you have to understand Java, the J2EE APIs, and the Model-View-Controller architecture. Even frameworks like Struts are functionally very poor compared to the Notes framework.

Scripting inside HTML tags can be construed as bad design, as it cannot preserve the WYSIWYG development experience of Lotus Notes or Microsoft Visual Basic. The latest attempt by IBM and the Java community to improve the JSP developer experience is called JavaServer Faces (JSF), which was proposed in JSR127. Simply put, JSF will allow JSP developers to manipulate visual components instead of taglibs. IBM has announced that it is currently developing a Web RAD component for a future release of WebSphere Studio based on JSF and is advertising that this will make J2EE more accessible to Notes developers. Quite frankly, JSF is no better than Microsoft's ASP.NET, and this is probably why more and more developers are weighing the benefits of .NET rather than WebSphere right now.

Perhaps the solution is to port the Notes development model itself on top of the J2EE stack. This seems like quite a daunting task, but it suffices to re-create the entire Notes framework in native XML. Consider an XML document-centric development model, an LDAP-based security framework, and a virtual XML document store to replace the NSF format for information sharing.

Also, a "VB-like" component model can enhance the J2EE development experience to make it completely WYSIWYG. Draw an HTML form, drop XML documents as data sources, and bind them to the form fields using W3C's XPath standard. There is absolutely no reason why J2EE should be more complex than Notes. EJBs are dead. You want scalability? Try Grid computing. I just came back from OracleWorld, and the new Oracle 10g infrastructure gives you infinite scalability without having to specifically design for it. Just add as many cheap computers to the Grid as you need when you need it. It's that simple.

As always, expect innovation to come from the Lotus Business Partner community itself. When you have a million captive developers, there is a high likelihood that someone has already started digging, and chances are that the tunnel has already been dug. Of course, there will always be those who will continue waiting for the door to magically open some day. But the good news is that there is life after Notes.