3 ms·

I did some LN work way back at the start of my career. I got to know the C apis pretty well, it wasn't that fun. Strangely, as CPUs/PCs got faster, it seemed t

I did some LN work way back at the start of my career. I got to know the C apis pretty well, it wasn't that fun. Strangely, as CPUs/PCs got faster, it seemed to get slower. By the time 2000 rolled around it would take SO LONG for a notes square/app to open. It was an interesting piece of software. Nothing has really replicated it. I'm kind of shocked it hasn't been dumped on the open source market and then rebuilt from the ground up.

cobertos 3y ago
Why weren't using the APIs fun? Can you talk a little more about what you did with it?
- AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  I know some of it was just bulk load and dump migration APIs. Otherwise it was 30 years ago, so I don't remember at all what was being done. But LN didn't really have a good query language. Sure it's all fun and wizards inside Lotus Notes itself, but one of the failings was that in the database part it wasn't really a database for anything but Lotus Notes. I believe at the time there was the beginnings of an ODBC interface to it, but it was buggy or insufficient for whatever reason. So LN wasn't good at sharing information, just like every office product really isn't good at it. Fine for people using UIs and Wizards. I mean, it is a TRAVESTY of possibly billions of dollars or more of wasted money that spreadsheet products and formats aren't trivially readable to get access to the data within them, but that is a rant for another day. Anyway, so if you wanted to integrate with LN data between rando-system, it was obtuse APIs. A "good" API makes connecting and data marshalling/representation/access pretty easy, along with search/index, etc. I believe there was locking annoyances that occurred as well when the API was in use. I'm not sure LN was built for multi-user all that well, but again I don't recall the technical limitations. I think a LN database was a single file, so if you're doing API-level mucking with the data, you had to lock it from the LN application/server from doing anything. All I remember is that Lotus Notes was "meh" on that front. Domino may have improved things, but by then I had moved my C skills to something else.

cobertos 3y ago

Why weren't using the APIs fun? Can you talk a little more about what you did with it?

AtlasBarfed 3y ago
I know some of it was just bulk load and dump migration APIs. Otherwise it was 30 years ago, so I don't remember at all what was being done. But LN didn't really have a good query language. Sure it's all fun and wizards inside Lotus Notes itself, but one of the failings was that in the database part it wasn't really a database for anything but Lotus Notes. I believe at the time there was the beginnings of an ODBC interface to it, but it was buggy or insufficient for whatever reason. So LN wasn't good at sharing information, just like every office product really isn't good at it. Fine for people using UIs and Wizards. I mean, it is a TRAVESTY of possibly billions of dollars or more of wasted money that spreadsheet products and formats aren't trivially readable to get access to the data within them, but that is a rant for another day. Anyway, so if you wanted to integrate with LN data between rando-system, it was obtuse APIs. A "good" API makes connecting and data marshalling/representation/access pretty easy, along with search/index, etc. I believe there was locking annoyances that occurred as well when the API was in use. I'm not sure LN was built for multi-user all that well, but again I don't recall the technical limitations. I think a LN database was a single file, so if you're doing API-level mucking with the data, you had to lock it from the LN application/server from doing anything. All I remember is that Lotus Notes was "meh" on that front. Domino may have improved things, but by then I had moved my C skills to something else.