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Summing up
by
David
DeJean |
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That's it. It's all over. Will the last person out of the Dolphin Hotel please turn out the lights? Lotusphere 2003 has left the building. Thursday always feels a little disjointed—sudden. The end comes so quickly. So we'll start there and work our way backwards.
Bryan Simmons stood up at the start of the closing General Session and made several important statements about Lotusphere 2004. The most important was that there will be a Lotusphere 2004. The question "Is this the last Lotusphere?" has been asked over and over this week. Actually it's been asked every year lately. For the last couple of years, it's seemed likely that pretty soon we'd be attending WebSpheresphere in Orlando the last week in January. This year it looks less likely.
Year-to-year comparisons are inevitable. Over the year since Lotusphere 2002, Lotus has acquired legs. Notes/Domino 6 shipped and looks very good. Other Lotus products continue to gain traction in the marketplace—Sametime, QuickPlace. The product rebranding effort will ensure that Lotus itself remains a significant name in the IBM family of brands.
At the end of Lotusphere 2002, we were almost overwhelmed by technological change—not only IBM's move to J2EE, but a bouquet of other acronyms: SOAP, XML, EJBs, and 20 or 30 more. At the same time, the announcement that support for JSPs would be removed from Domino 6 made the IBM Lotus strategy hard to follow.
Now see what a difference a year can make. The Domino code geeks spent this week clamoring for more red meat—the conventional wisdom in the hallways was that this year's sessions weren't technical enough. (Bryan Simmons promised that would be fixed: Lotusphere 2004 will look a lot geekier, with more technical sessions, more attention to core Domino issues—and the Business Partner perspective—and IBM Research will get more floorspace and mindshare.)
On the other hand, there's general agreement this year that there actually is a strategy. Jeff Calow, who as development manager for JSP support bore the brunt of the outrage over JSP support, says, "There's no comparison. This year my job has been much easier."
The developer's roadmap
Jeff and Beverly DeWitt presented a breakout session, AD101, titled "Lotus Technology Strategy and Lotus Domino Developer's Roadmap." If you missed it, look up their presentation file. It lays out the strategy in a technology context, beginning with the mission of IBM Software Group: "Create a highly modular portfolio that can easily be assembled into high-value solutions and whose pieces integrate seamlessly."
The Lotus role, says Jeff, is to provide the collaboration capabilities that run on top of the platform pieces, which are identified by major IBM brands: WebSphere, Tivoli, DB2, Rational. These collaboration capabilities will provide a common infrastructure to support a variety of collaboration activities both as new applications (next gen mail, for example) for the standards-based J2EE platform, and on that durable platform, Notes/Domino.
So what does this mean for the Domino developer community? Here's where the roadmap comes in. Today, it's business as usual. There are lots of Notes client applications with no J2EE equivalent. Integration begins with WebSphere Portal and continues in "blended" applications that use the capabilities of both Domino and WebSphere to do something neither could do alone. (Look at the presentations for the two-part "Building Blended Applications," AD102 and AD103s, to see what they are and how they're put together.)
This brings us to Beverly DeWitt's part of the presentation. Developers will have to learn to develop for the J2EE platform, but that doesn't mean Lotus expects them to follow a career path based on coding pure Java applications in Notepad.
"The next generation of products will be J2EE/WebSphere-based," she says, "but J2EE is extremely complex, so a lot of effort is being focused on creating a visual environment for developing rich J2EE Web applications with minimal coding."
She gave us a peek at what that visual environment might look like in another breakout session, AD308, titled "Sneak Preview: Rapid Application Development Tool for WebSphere Studio"—and it just might look a lot like Domino Designer. George DeCandio of IBM's WebSphere development team demoed the current WebSphere 5 and the prototype RAD Tool. Bill Andreas was on hand, as well, to talk about the process of producing a tool that will surely make Domino developers more comfortable with J2EE.
The RAD Tool for WebSphere will be released as alpha code later this year, Beverly said, in an effort to get developers involved in shaping it as quickly as possible. If you can't wait that long, you can download the new Domino Toolkit for WebSphere Studio from LDD and get started even sooner.
Lotusphere—When you come here, you're family
The official statement on Lotusphere 2003 attendance is "approximately 5,000." That's down dramatically from the peak of maybe 12,000 or so of three and four years ago. We were a select group this year—selected by a bad economy and concerns about security, among other factors. But hey, I'll take it.
Scott Wenzel, in his Tuesday session, got misty-eyed when he talked about Lotusphere as a special community of people. I'll even take it a little farther. This year's more intimate Lotusphere occasionally felt more like a family reunion than a business conference. Maybe its the history. Ten years of spending a week with the same people has created a lot of relationships and family stories. Take Shamu the shark, for instance. Please.
The story is helping us become a self-aware community, but who are we? Wenzel's Gonzo Web site calls us "Lotuspherians" and "Spherians." I think "Spheriods" has some merit—among other things, it says we must be really cool because we're not squares.
Of course, like any family, we can be a bit dysfunctional at times. Usually the time is about 2 PM on Thursday when the Notes/Domino panel seats itself in rows across a stage and accepts questions from the audience for the "Ask the Developers" session.
Some years the seating arrangement has suggested a shooting gallery as questioners flock to the floor mikes to fire verbal salvos at the developers. Occasionally things have gotten downright uncivil. This year, however, a spirit of goodwill prevailed. There were of course requests for pet features. Some of them drew lots of applause, like shared columns and formula libraries and spam control. Others were head-scratchers the developers could only promise to look into.
Some information emerged on futures. There will be iNotes support for Linux server and client, for example, but no native Linux Notes client. Nor will there be a Mac Domino server.
Perhaps the marked civility of the event was due to the fact that Notes/Domino 6 has (finally) shipped, and all the extra QE it got has reduced the things we Spheroids might have complained about. Perhaps it's because of the heightened respect and admiration the Lotusphere family feels for the development team. Perhaps it's just because 10 years of history means we're all a decade older and more accepting.
Hey, we love you, guys. OK, really big virtual group hug! |
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