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
