Andrew Pollack's Blog

Technology, Family, Entertainment, Politics, and Random Noise

Software Complexity Peaking Again

By Andrew Pollack on 08/24/2007 at 11:00 AM EDT

Lotus Notes 8 is a huge step forward in what developers will be able to do. I’m already seeing the first posts in partner forums and on blogs showing simple side bar applications that make use of some of the extensibility. These remind me of the first wiz-bang buttons and actions in Notes 4 that used Lotuscript. In those days, that kind of work was considered very high end development for Notes. Today of course, most Notes developers think in LS and forget how easy formula language is to work with.

In a year or two we’ll look back at these first few widgets that are so exciting and not give them a second glance. Customized add on products for the Notes client will become commonplace and increasingly cool to look at. I’m predicting that someone will even re-skin the client fairly early on.

The downside though, is complexity. The Notes 8 success depends on a whole new layer. The Eclipse Framework, which itself depends on another layer, the JVM, which is itself built to run on the operating system’s UI framework, which is layered on top of the operating system driver model, that ties into the operating system kernel, which provides access to the services of the hardware by way of the bios layer. Whew.

The days when you could write software that could talk directly to the hardware with a simple interrupt 0x21 call are long gone.

Each of these layers has individually proven reliable, but each also has to be very flexible. The success of the x86 based PC – now called the “WinTel” model – is that the driver model has always been open. Ironic, isn’t it? Regardless of which of the models you’re using though – Wintel, Linux, Mac OSX, BSD, or whatever – a similar stack does exist and the increasing flexibility of each layer means that there are more and rougher edges at the boundaries where these layers meet.

Notes 8 no longer installs with just one application (or three if you include Designer and Admin). It has to install and manage the eclipse framework – even if there is already another eclipse framework on the machine for something else. Compare the complexity of your Notes 8 directory tree with your Notes 7 one some time. Look at the stuff in notes/data/framework and you’ll see Eclipse installed there.

Installation issues and configuration control is going to be a tricky problem for a while as all these new layers gain tighter and tighter integration. I suspect some patience will be needed.


There are  - loading -  comments....

re: Software Complexity Peaking AgainBy Bob Balfe on 08/28/2007 at 11:09 AM EDT
Nice write up Andrew. We (the Lotus Expeditor team) already have customers
that are completely re-doing the workbench look and feel (called Personalities
in the Expeditor API's). I think once the community grasps Expeditor and
Eclipse by the horns you will see exactly what you describe here.

Thanks


Other Recent Stories...

  1. 01/26/2023Better Running VirtualBox or VMWARE Virtual Machines on Windows 10+ Forgive me, Reader, for I have sinned. I has been nearly 3 years since my last blog entry. The truth is, I haven't had much to say that was worthy of more than a basic social media post -- until today. For my current work, I was assigned a new laptop. It's a real powerhouse machine with 14 processor cores and 64 gigs of ram. It should be perfect for running my development environment in a virtual machine, but it wasn't. VirtualBox was barely starting, and no matter how many features I turned off, it could ...... 
  2. 04/04/2020How many Ventilators for the price of those tanks the Pentagon didn't even want?This goes WAY beyond Trump or Obama. This is decades of poor planning and poor use of funds. Certainly it should have been addressed in the Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Reagan administrations -- all of which were well aware of the implications of a pandemic. I want a military prepared to help us, not just hurt other people. As an American I expect that with the ridiculous funding of our military might, we are prepared for damn near everything. Not just killing people and breaking things, but ...... 
  3. 01/28/2020Copyright Troll WarningThere's a copyright troll firm that has automated reverse-image searches and goes around looking for any posted images that they can make a quick copyright claim on. This is not quite a scam because it's technically legal, but it's run very much like a scam. This company works with a few "clients" that have vast repositories of copyrighted images. The trolls do a reverse web search on those images looking for hits. When they find one on a site that looks like someone they can scare, they work it like ...... 
  4. 03/26/2019Undestanding how OAUTH scopes will bring the concept of APPS to your Domino server 
  5. 02/05/2019Toro Yard Equipment - Not really a premium brand as far as I am concerned 
  6. 10/08/2018Will you be at the NYC Launch Event for HCL Domino v10 -- Find me! 
  7. 09/04/2018With two big projects on hold, I suddenly find myself very available for new short and long term projects.  
  8. 07/13/2018Who is HCL and why is it a good thing that they are now the ones behind Notes and Domino? 
  9. 03/21/2018Domino Apps on IOS is a Game Changer. Quit holding back. 
  10. 02/15/2018Andrew’s Proposed Gun Laws 
Click here for more articles.....


pen icon Comment Entry
Subject
Your Name
Homepage
*Your Email
* Your email address is required, but not displayed.
 
Your thoughts....
 
Remember Me  

Please wait while your document is saved.