Domino vs WebSphere

Ok, before i start, this is not a political entry, i don’t care about fan boys or purists, I’m just a contractor earning a living hopefully without the users shouting at me too much, so on that basis lets begin:

For some time Domino has been a dirty word, i don’t know why, perhaps MS did a good job of blackening it during the 90’s exchange wars, or people don’t like the look and feel, i just don’t know, i do know that when you mention it in a lot of corporate environments in the context of making a new app, the room is suddenly filled with frowning managers and someone mutters the word ‘Legacy’, on the flip side if you build the app and thanks to domino its working, secuire and in in record time, for little extra cost, no one minds, thus is the nature of the corporates.

Now one of my major clients is building a monster new app and they are using the following

Java 1.5
Ant 1.7.1
Spring Framework 2.5.5
Spring Facelets 2.0.3
Spring Webflow 2.0.3
Spring Javascript (Dojo) 2.0.3
Hibernate 3
Websphere 6.1

All very nice and sexy, but no domino, i was asked which of the list could be provided by domino i came up with this

Java 1.5 (in Domino 8.0+)
Ant 1.7.1 (packaged no, not really, we use .ntf’s)
Spring Framework 2.5.5 (Sure)
Spring Facelets 2.0.3 (A version of JSF is in Xpages i think)
Spring Webflow 2.0.3 (Dont Know)
Spring Javascript (Dojo) 2.0.3 (yup, and built in in version 8.5)
Hibernate 3 (yup)
Websphere 6.1 (use domino)

looking at it I’m quite pleased, domino seems to be keeping up nicely, then i have another think, is IBM just trying to keep domino up to date? or are we back to the year 2000~ times when domino was going to be a websphere bolt on sooner or later and they are just doing it an a gentle way this time, baseless rumor, and ultimately pointless from my point of view, as IT’ers we cycle our skill sets every 2 years, but one thing i know, the next year is gonna be a fab one for learning new stuff regardless of if your a domino fan boy or a Websphere Conny and in the end we will all be code Gods.

What is love

its opening up a pack of sandwiches and realising that they have been made for you fresh that morning, cut into triangles and even placed cross wise to look nice, its realising that you are sitting there in clean clothes that were wash and ironed (even the socks were paired) by someone else for no other reason than they wanted to.

by the way “guilt is” realising that you have done nothing to deserve this (fk fk f**k!!)

P.S. there are other things that i class as love as well, but other people seem to class them as variously “get a room”, “arrrgh my eyes” and “WTF, im calling the police”

4 tips

1) You’ve just upgraded your windows domino server to the latest and greatest version, but for what ever reason, you have bounced it before running domino, when it comes back up it just sits and hangs at “applying windows setting”, after staring at the screen stupidly for about 15 Min’s, you realise domino is stuck at the “do you wish to update you system databases designs” prompt, but you cant get at the screen, you cant click yes as windows is waiting for the service to completely start, solution, map a drive to you D$ (or what ever) from another machine, yes you can do that!!, rename the notes.ini file, and reboot, windows will throw up a service error, sulk for 2 Min’s then let you in, rename your ini file back and load your domino server, sweet!,

2) So you have an ill web app server, that needs a bounce or 2 during the business day, you or the Dev’s are working on the fix but it will take a day or two (or more if its hardware related), how do lessen the impact on the users, simple!, use sso (single sign on), its dead easy to set up (look it up in the admin nsf) and if the server crashes, when you bring it back up the user does not have to re-login to get back to where they were (often they just blame the pause on the Internet/proxy and you get to escape blame all together. Ray!!!!)

3) Linux full screen apps suck balls on your ubuntu machine (VMware, MAME etc), you always seem to get menus and stuff appearing at the top an bottom, and they flicker and come and go as they please, well weep no more, turn off the “visual Effects” (System –> Preferences –> Appearance, last tab), and get back to enjoying samurai showdown VI (and of course VMWARE) in glorious 256 colour full screen.

4) It doesn’t matter how bad your diarrhea is, always check that there is toilet paper before you sit down on the bowl.

The Mad Fools

Exhibiting a set of suicidal tendency’s totally unlike them, members of the UKLUG organising committee asked me to do an interview with lotususergroup.org, the result can be found Here, i present this instead of anything useful i can put in a blog (i have tons of half finished articles, and stuff i should have done, but instead i have been ignoring my out of main client work, bad bad man, and instead have been swimming in a river in Yorkshire, yes it was flippin cold, i have spared you the horror of inserting an image here)

Filler blog entry

I have a hell of a lot of stuff to write about and tons of work to do, but for some reason am not doing them (lazy toad that i am), but i want to put at least one thing up per week that might be of some use to people and the big stuff is taking to long to write up, so here’s something for the admins, its called unlocker assistant and can be found http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/
(well i can be found all over the place but this is the best place)

Simply put, this means you can pull a sickly or corrupt database out of a domino server when the server wont let go of it, yes i know that theoretically risks crashing or damage the database, but quite frankly, if your going to have to bounce the box and the database looks stuffed, then your risking that anyway and it keeps the rest of the server up for the rest of the business day, i’ve used it a lot and have not had any problems at all, the server does a little W.T.F. “wheres me database” but copes with it in a few seconds, try it when your devs screw up their server and see what i mean.

On other news, it looks like i have been accepted as a speaker for uklug, this is fab and i am looking forward to it, there is only one problem, and that is i looked at the other Speakers and quite frankly I’m the only there that i have not heard of (lots of important people and one random peasant), eeek!