Hacker News Reader

Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Domino had a NoSQL document database with reliable multi-master replication before they were cool. It could have been a great platform for cloud applications but IBM never saw the potential and let it languish.

View on HN

That is an accurate, succinct summary of the story, but IBM also made it non-viable as a SaaS back-end because the license was paid per CPU core. There was literally no way to both scale an app and keep the cost competitive with other platforms.

Sure that was one reason. I think the lack of support for multi-tenant applications was just as serious an obstacle for SaaS.

I worked on a team that built a SAAS around 1998 on Notes/Domino. IIRC, we had a Notes database template and created replicas of it for every tenant.

I believe we accomplished all of this using some crazy LotusScript. We pushed really hard to get our product out before Lotus could release Instant Team Room.

I worked at a Lotus Notes shop that actually made a SaaS project management/collaboration tool in the late 90s that we hosted at USWest[1][2].

We spun off every tenant as a replica of a Lotus Notes database template (my lingo might be wrong, since 20 years has passed). People, at that time, however, hadn't quite warmed up to the concept of subscription software though.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/free-site-offered-with-groupware/

[2] https://books.google.ca/books?id=jlIEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA52&lpg=PA...

CouchDB was inspired by Lotus Notes, and created by an ex-Lotus Notes developer.

https://www.wired.com/2012/12/couchdb/

One critical thing CouchDB solved that (I heard) was an issue with Notes is availability during sync. CouchDB streams changes while you work, but Notes apps (used to?) have to pause to sync.

Source: I helped develop CouchDB, but haven't really used Notes.

I used to be a Notes Developer (i.e. wrote Notes applications, rather than wrote the code for Notes itself). From what I remember, replication used to take place in the background. You'd refresh your document view (or whatever) and new documents would appear.

If two people were editing the same document in different replicas of the same database, then you would get two copies of the document with one labelled as a "replication or save conflict".

Handling of replication conflicts is configurable. You can tell the database engine to automatically merge documents if the conflict didn't impact the same field, or to automatically delete the older change.

Fair point. Not sure if I ever turned it on though.

Domino databases have always been fully accessible to applications during replication.

+ IBM acquired Cloudant, which is fully CouchDB compatible, and is based off Couch.

Couchdb and Cloudant are awesome awesome databases, and I'm staggered that they have a legacy of any kind from Notes shocked

With backend code in java (Domino Java Agent) !

Reply on news.ycombinator.com