Why do you need to settle on one or the other?

Anyway, the only reason you need Domino IMHO is because you have linked in 
with other Lotus notes applications. However, if this is a public site not 
an intranet, I would strongly urge them not to use this short cut for 
putting apps out there. Lotus Notes apps are badly slapped together front 
ends on top of apps written on another computing paradigm (client 
server)... which don't mix well.

However, if that argument is not being listened to, you can use the 
engineering tact. Sneak apache in there with mod_proxy and mod_rewrite and 
follow Stas' guide on having backend versus front end servers.

Use apache on the front end (and an optional backend for mod_perl) and 
Lotus notes as a backend server. This has the advantage of allowing the 
domino server to scale better since it will only be hit for domino app-like 
things rather than images which can be cached by the front-end server. This 
includes security advantages in that Lotus Notes server, being so bloated 
with app code) is not something you might want directly exposed to the 
Internet.

Anyway, I've been at two largish organizations in the last 4 years that 
wanted to switch away from Notes to the Web.

One was early enough. The other was too late as their infrastructure was 
already dedicated to it and it was very hard to convert all the apps 
because the requirements that went into building the apps were organic and 
never written down-- so a web rewrite would have involved a lot of 
analysis. In the end, that company did switch off of Notes in a major way 
though but it was done in pockets and done very gradually over the course 
of a year -- and they still are not completely off of it.

If Notes is used in an Intranet, I see no reason to rewrite everything for 
the web from scratch with today's shortage of IT personnel. And it will 
give the Notes developers the capability to start learning how a web server 
works so that they can slowly train themselves up on other technologies...

One thing to understand, is a lot of the time notes admins are really 
secretaries, ex-mail administrators, etc... that also double as form 
builders and data entry clerks. So it isn't so easy or instant to convert 
these pseudo-IT people into web people with a point and click and 
installing an apache server.

You don't want to piss these people off either. They are [a] close to the 
data and [b] usually close to the business that creates the data (and a 
business person can usually override an IT person in any organization). A 
lot of training and hand holding is required to get buy-in from these 
pseudo-IT people -- on the surface they are not powerful, but they do form 
a strong current.

Later,
    Gunther

At 08:36 AM 4/23/00 -1000, you wrote:
>Hi dear modperlers,
>
>We have a client here willing to use Domino to serve
>his Web site.
>
>The site should not be very busy (we expect about 15000
>hits per day), but is relatively complex, with database
>integration, visitors tracking, customers logins, SSL...
>
>As anyone on the list already used this strange beast ?
>
>What could I say to this client to make him change his
>mind, apart from obvious reasons (price, closed and
>proprietary solution, nobody uses it, less than 1% on
>the Internet).
>
>Thanks for any response.
>
>Jean-Denis Girard
>Essential Software

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