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I know Domino exceedingly well. I started working with it in '94, and continued with it in one form or another until 2021. My last gig with it was even a Domin
by codingdave 1y ago
I know Domino exceedingly well. I started working with it in '94, and continued with it in one form or another until 2021. My last gig with it was even a Domino-based SaaS that reached over 8 figures ARR, and is still up and running. Everything in this post sounds completely accurate. Domino is absolutely a viable platform from the back-end, database perspective.
But that is not the important point when deciding whether to use it, because it is absolutely not a viable platform from the "Can you find a team to actually code on this platform?" perspective.
By the time I had finished with that last gig, I told everyone the same thing: That I personally knew both Domino and modern web frameworks and could blend them together to have a modern front-end on that back-end. But I figure there are a couple dozen people in the world who know both sides well enough to do so, because the industry moved on. The talent moved on. Or retired. Most of my work post-2009 was decommission projects. At the same time, new frameworks have come to fruition since the 90s, so all the special features Domino has baked in just aren't that unique anymore. There are also almost no jobs in it, so no reason for people to learn it.
At the end of the day, you cannot run a company on a tech stack where there is no talent pool.
- orionblastar 1y agoDomino phased out when IBM OS/2 phased out. The old greybeards who did OS/2 and Domino died or retired—the same with COBOL and mainframes. OS/2 is still made, you can find out more about it here: https://www.arcanoae.com/about/ https://www.arcanoae.com/about/ IBM's latest updates on Domino: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/dsm?topic=lotus-domino https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/dsm?topic=lotus-domino It looks like Domino is still supported. I wrote apps in the 1990s using ASP and VBScript and Javascript and ActiveX. We didn't use Domino.
- nradov 1y agoYou seem to be confused. Domino had little to do with OS/2. OS/2 was once one of the supported platforms for Domino (along with several others), but IBM continued active Domino development for many years after they gave up on OS/2. The "old greybeards" who built Domino came from Iris Associates which was completely separate from the team that built OS/2.
- wmf 1y agoDomino lived around 20 years longer than OS/2.
- nradov 1y agoI worked with Domino extensively and some of the core technology was great. But with a 64GB database size limit it was really only suitable for small applications. We tried to work around that limit with sharding but it wasn't very practical.
- cube00 1y agoAssuming the space was being consumed by attachments, DAOS can help with this. There's reports [1] of people getting up to 2TB once you get the attachments out of the NSF. [1]: https://ds_infolib.hcltechsw.com/ldd/nd85forum.nsf/DateAllFlatweb/FDA9C3207FAB52D48525757B003E7762?OpenDocument https://ds_infolib.hcltechsw.com/ldd/nd85forum.nsf/DateAllFl...
- nradov 1y agoYa, that didn't help. We were dealing with high volumes of healthcare structured text data, not attachments. I never understood why IBM couldn't just fix the NSF size limit. It was so stupid.
- dcrazy 1y agoI have no specific knowledge of the Domino database format, but extrapolating from my knowledge of database storage formats in general: the database file almost certainly contained data structures of fixed size. Many of the fields in these data structures likely contained offsets to other data structures, such as an index that contains the offsets of each item. Fixing the size limit would require migrating to a new file format with different data structures. Migrations are always hard to sell to customers and a ripe opportunity for data corruption, and horizontal sharding can solve the same problem while also addressing other scalability and reliability issues.
- nradov 1y agoI never claimed that changing database file formats was easy, but IBM had already increased the size limit once before from 4GB to 64GB. So obviously increasing it further could have been done. Unfortunately IBM leadership never saw Domino as anything more than a platform for small internal corporate IT applications so they didn't care about fixing the limitations; it was a total failure of vision. IBM didn't provide any tools for horizontal sharding either. We had to roll our own, which was a huge expense and made every part of the application far more complex. And it actually made reliability worse; because displaying incomplete data was not acceptable to customers, if any one database got corrupted then everything failed.
- j45 1y agoReading about this some more.. Domino runs on Lotuscript.. which is is ecmascript.. And ecmascript is better known as JavaScript.
- j45 1y agoIndirectly, is this post.. why JavaScript?
- nradov 1y agoNope. LotusScript had nothing to do with JavaScript. LotusScript was kind of similar to Visual Basic (although not really compatible). But JavaScript could also be used in certain areas. The core Domino features were written in C/C++, not any scripting language.