The Lotus Domino Web Application Server Team Interview by Betsy Kosheff

Level: All Works with: All Updated: 27-Jan-97

The Lotus Development campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is dominated by the towering Lotus Development Building overlooking the Charles River. Across the street in two less imposing structures, the engineers live. The older of the two facilities, known as Rogers Street, houses some 700 developers, as well as parking for most of the 2,000 employees in Cambridge. The building itself looks like a garage. Inside, people write code pretty much the way everybody else does. But what you might not expect, is that even in a company the size of Lotus, now an IBM subsidiary, software like Lotus Domino can still be developed -- from concept, to design to architecture and programming -- in much the same way that the earliest PC products were developed, by a small group of people banded together in a garage with a common idea. The core Domino team is less than a dozen people, but the initial concept began with a couple of people batting around the idea that Notes was the ideal server for the Web. We caught up with several members of the team to talk about the technical details of Domino, and to find out their plans for future enhancements.

Who came up with the Domino name? What does it mean?

Dennis Cunningham
I proposed it as a code name, but it was Julio and Miguel Estrada who provided the impetus. They were engaged in a weekend long match of Dominoes with their father and uncle, and they were describing what it meant to be involved in this game, how intense it was, and how seriously everyone was taking it.

Julio Estrada
In Spanish, Domino is pronounced much more emphatically "DomiNO," and in the game, the person who places the last stone on the table wins, or dominates. It's typically done with a very violent shot on the table. It makes a big noise and all the pieces kind of jump up and down. I guess in a way we were hoping Domino would do that in the Web server market.