Jean-Denis Girard wrote:
>
> Hi dear modperlers,
>
> We have a client here willing to use Domino to serve
> his Web site.
>
I started considering Domino a while ago. My conclusion
was to flee from it.
I haven't used it and these were the opinions of real
programmers that used it. I'll try to recall things
they told me ;
- It uses a lot of CPU and RAM, if you think mod_perl
eats RAM, you've never used domino. I've seen this
happening in intranet with around 1000 users. They
had to install alphas with NT.
- It does not farming. If you install domino you'll end
up having a lot of domains, one for every section of
your web, each one in a server. Your users will go
crazy searching dead links and asking you what server
holds now the pages they were using.
Because you'll start moving databases to a new server
as soon as the older started die of resources.
- Amazing lack of features, the API to the web server maybe
exists but no developer I talked to knew nothing about
sending headers, internal redirects and so. I was
comparing to mod_perl, and HTML::Mason, the dhandler
and autohander stuff was very important for me and
I wanted something like this. I didn't find it.
- It does not SQL, building an application for the web
with domino takes a big effort of analising, programming
and maintaining. A thing that would be very easy with
a SQL database can be very hard or impossible to do
with domino. I was told is hard to feed such a database
from 3rd party data. And if you must add more data
again to domino is harder again.
- It's impossible to separate content from formatting.
- You don't embed a language in HTML, you ask domino
about inserting html inside your code.
My conclusion was it's no good for web programming.
I went to a super human software lotus show and it was
very disapointing, a lot of vapourware. I thought it
must be very bad when they admitted nested tables didn't
work at all in domino 4.x, and started working at 5.0.
In addition I must say mod_perl has a lot of features
never dreamed by people that use Domino or IIS+ASP.
I have asked to other programmers friends of mine
who use these platforms, no one uses mod_perl and they
think their tools are far better than mine and easier
to use. I quit advocacing mod_perl. For every feature
they lack, they have work arounds or don't use it.
--
- frankie -
