Subject: RE: Why do I feel so guilty?
Subject: RE: Why do I feel so guilty?
Hello, Willy!
Well, I’m sorry that you didn’t have decent Notes programmers doing this for you. Standard operating procedure is to give the server access to everything, so when you make a backup, ALL the documents are there and it can be easily restored. (This is Notes development 101). To have 7 developers all have local replicas and ask them to each restore their replica copies doesn’t make much sense to any of us who have developed with Notes for more than 2-3 years. Obviously, few or none of those 7 have.
As for Readers fields, you typically add a role like “[Admin]” in a readers’ field in each document and give the server the “[Admin]” role. This way, if the db is backed up by the server, all the documents will be backed up, and all the documents restored in one shot. When this is done, backups work fine, and, uhh…
Well, I don’t think you really care, anyways. I just feel bad that a few inexperienced, incompetent programmers ruined Notes for you.
Good luck!
Steve in NYC
“If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.”
Subject: RE: Why do I feel so guilty?
Deadly serious
Which makes one of us apparently
Why would you blame Notes for the fact you did not back up an app that people were working on? Or you lack of understanding of replication and the security model within Notes which led to all the developers having different documents in their replicas (and again - why do they have documents other than for testing - surely the developers were working on TEMPLATES?) A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
It would be like me developing a C# app. I have little/virtually no knowledge of it. Could probably hack something together in a few days after reading some articles. But an experienced C# developer would laugh himself silly within 5 minutes of looking at it. Would that send me running to the C# forums to berate the language? No.
“What difference would a backup have made?”. I love that comment. I hope your current employer doesn;t read this forum Willy!
Mike
Subject: RE: Why do I feel so guilty?
I think you’ll find (if you do a bit of research) that Willy has a pretty good grip on the basics of the Notes platform. He’s been at it a while, you know (his V3 @Sum formula was ein meisterstuck). If he’s found disillusionment, at least it’s been arrived at the hard way.
(Please don’t let the recent accessibility thread lead you to believe that I don’t respect Willy’s Notes prowess – it’s just that living with a severe disability leads one to a more acute appreciation of the need for accessibility, even if it means bending the platform to suit. Most devs don’t really get the point. I didn’t either before the stroke.)
Subject: RE: Why do I feel so guilty?
Stan,
I’m confused as to your post and the reference to the accessibility issues and how it pertains to this particular thread.
My posts directed at Willy (intended purely tennis game of opinions - I certainly won’t change his opinion and he won’t change mine) are only based on the post I read. Reseaching each individual poster before replying is probably a bit of a stretch. (Maybe a box for people to put experience which is displayed in the header - newbie, beginner, developer, admin etc?)
Admittedly, it lends more weight to the thread to know that he is not someone who has dipped into Notes recently. The information and comments in his posts would not lead people to suspect this straight away though. I don’t claim to be a guru of Notes or anything of the sort. I just want to defend Notes against the fact that it is always first in line for the blame hen it is obvious that other factors lead to disillusionment.
He could be the greatest developer in the world - but if you don’t backup your applications, don’t blame Notes when you can’t get your stuff back.
Mike
Subject: RE: Why do I feel so guilty?
Just to clarify – from someone who has “known” Willy Lorenzo for almost 14 years, even though I don’t recall that we’ve ever met:
In the early days of Notes, Willy was known amongst Lotus Partners as one of a very small group of “star” Notes developers. I’m not sure when he started, but he was active in on-line forums before I was, and like I said, it’s been almost (about a month shy) of 14 years since I first ran across his name. His ability to get around limitations in Notes, and to find – by trial and error, or intuition – ways to use features that nobody else had thought of, stood out in his posts and made it obvious that he was a gifted problem solver. It was known that he was working – successfully – on some of the most intricate application code in existence in Notes It was definitely noticed when he disappeared from view a few years afterward. And by the way, he was not the only one of that early group of “stars” who disappeared. Notes, and posting to on-line forums, aren’t a life sentence, I guess. Not for everyone, anyhow 
That said, Willy Lorenzo has probably seen more problems and harder problems than just about any of us commenting here. I say probably because I’ve not been in touch with him and I don’t know what he’s been doing – but I can’t possibly believe that he’s been keeping busy with menial jobs that any hack could do and has therefore fallen far behind the state of the art and lost his creativity. I have to believe that any situations that even he can’t analyze, not to mention solve… they’re almost certainly signs of very fundamental issues.
Now, exactly what those fundamental issues are, how deep they go, and how important they are… that’s debatable. Willy has his thoughts, and I certainly have mine. We’re all entitled to them. What’s not debatable is that there are fundamental issues. Anyone who has worked at a high enough level long enough, on applications that try to push at the limits of what has been done but stay within the limits of what can and should be done, has seen such issues.
I’ve seen cases where document counts don’t align properly, too, by the way. Situations that I can’t explain, and trust me when I tell you that I know more than enough about readernames fields, selective replication (which is the devil’s own feature – and I could discuss what I believe to be fundamental flaws inherent in how that is implemented, but that would be another digression that we don’t need right now), and the various and sundry potential legitimate causes. Now, after dealing with such cases I may not have come to the same conclusion that Willy has. In fact, I have not. My perspective is different, and I can’t tell you which of us is objectively right or wrong in those conclusions. I can tell you that while I don’t believe that occasional occurrences of problems with document counts prove that Notes and Domino are fundamentally flawed in the ways that Willy says; but I have to admit that such things do make it extremely difficult for us, as application developers/owners, to prove that our applications are working correctly and that our data is being properly taken care of by the system – and that, in and of itself, is a fundamental flaw.
So, I may disagree with Willy in his final analysis, and I’m sure many of us do, but that definitely doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have plenty of facts, plenty of war stories, to back up his assertions. I’m sure he does.
Subject: LOL. You beat me to it, Rich…Why do I feel so guilty?
I was about to out Willy myself.
For those that don’t know him, Willy worked for years in Notes product development for a very well known CRM company. He cut his teeth on Notes at about the same time I did. And for a long time, he was substantially better at it than me. (We haven’t compared work in over a decade.)
And when he was the first guy to figure out how to get the sum of an arbitrary list of numbers in a field in the Notes client, he was the envy of the Notes programming universe. (Such as it was, at the time.) He literally defined a new way of thinking about problem solving in @formulas, that remained a benchmark for using functions until Damien Katz’s rewrite of the formula engine in ND6.
If YOU can figure out how to sum an array of between 2 and 1000 numbers WITHOUT USING A LOOP, then you might be in a position to debate the merits of the Notes/Domino platform with Wilfredo Lorenzo.
Now, why he’s having these problems with this high-volatility database, I couldn’t say. And frankly, I’d love to take a crack at it, if he wants to contact me.
nathan.freeman@lotus911.com, old friend.
And sorry I haven’t stayed in closer touch!
Subject: RE: Why do I feel so guilty?
As a long time administrator (who has often had to troubleshoot someone else’s code), and hack developer, I tend to agree with the gist of Willy’s post: sometimes things DO just go wrong for no discernible reason. However, I’m not in a position to compare it to other platforms, having not had anything like the same depth of exposure.
Over the 10 years I’ve been using it, I’ve found that Notes is REALLY good for some stuff, but occasionally gets used for the wrong application. I’ve seen some awful attempts at customer management systems using Notes, when a relational DB would be so much a better fit.
And since I’m on this here horse, I really wish Lotus had worked harder on the look, feel and performance of the mail template back in the 90’s
Subject: Willy, is this from what I think it’s from?.. re: Why do I feel so guilty?
Was this an app at the same place where we worked together?
'cause I’m not surprised in the least that the cobbler’s children had no shoes. That environment was NEVER well taken care of. And a lack of cross-checking on an in-house system there is pretty predictable when you think about it.
Subject: RE: Willy, is this from what I think it’s from?.. re: Why do I feel so guilty?
Subject: RE: Willy, is this from what I think it’s from?.. re: Why do I feel so guilty?
I’m kind of surprised you haven’t taken it upon yourself to write a dbCompare utility yourself
But really, it is something that IBM should do. A dual-paned NotesPeek that shows only the docs that are different in each of two nsf files would be truly helpful – with several ways to define “different”. E.g., unid exists in one nsf but not the other, same unid in both but different oid, or even by field comparison.
Hmmm… I like that idea so much, I’m going to post it to http://www.ideajam.net
Subject: RE: Willy, is this from what I think it’s from?.. re: Why do I feel so guilty?
Subject: RE: Why do I feel so guilty?
Hello!
For that number of documents, it is probably true that the database would be slow and eventually have problems. Developed perhaps differently, it should be able to work well, though. I’ve had dbs up to 40GBs, into the hundreds of thousands of documents updated regularly, and it wasn’t a huge problem.
One of the drawbacks is it is too easy to develop small apps. Someone creates a form and a view, and they are an expert Notes developer (so they think). Many people, I’m sure, get jobs just with some very basic knowledge.
Despite the problem in the one application you had, I’m glad to see that you’ve still been able to use it for 15+ years, anyways. 
Thanks!
Steve in NYC
Subject: RE: Why do I feel so guilty?
Subject: Why do I feel so guilty? To Willy and Bill
Hi Willy,
You said:
I wish IBM would provide a fuller set of basic databases that people would use and then want to get expanded.
Look here, it may be a good start
http://www.lotusgeek.com/SapphireOak/LotusGeekBlog.nsf/D6Plinks/ROLR-764GSC
For your cluster ot of sync:
For you local replicas, maybe you have problems with db out of synch
Bill:
You said:
I think you hit the nail on the head. Some of the ‘Best’ projects are not necessarily the most technically challenging, but because the meet a specific business need they have a great impact.
I think you are totally right.
JYR
Subject: Interesting, can you give more information?
This hasn’t been my experience. Unless you’re stupid enough to build something like an airline reservation system on it.
Subject: RE: Interesting, can you give more information?
Willy’s former employer (and mine!) often engaged in extremely ambitious Notes/Domino projects. And very few resources were devoted to internal purposes. I’m not even remotely surprised that they had a problem with a large-scale in-house app.
Subject: You did expect those replys …
… didn’t you? Of course, you have all right in the world to stand to your opinion and to tell everybody what made you dislike Notes so much. You’re still giving valuable advice to the users of this forum, so it should be even more justified.
Or maybe not so. As you said, you’ll be gone again in a couple of days leaving us in our lowly Notes misery and only return when you feel like it. That’s OK of course, but it’s also a little bit unfair. Your bold statement, that Notes doesn’t cut it for anything serious still stands up. More fellow posters will disagree and argument against it with passion.
Your statement might be based on broad personal experience, but the discussion it causes is still 99% useless. There are examples for business critical Notes applications running well, there are (maybe even more) examples for even small applications failing miserably. There are different reasons for that and Notes not being appropriate for everything people have thrown it at is one of them for sure. I don’t even feel like arguing about other reasons of failure, like the on average rather low skill level of many Notes programmers (whoever is to blame for that).
I just think, that a statement like yours gets us nowhere, even more in this kind of forum. Don’t get me wrong, no anger or hard feelings on my part. I won’t change your mind, and you’ll probably not change mine …
Subject: You are a long way off base!
The two strongest reasons that I suggest Notes/Domino for is reliability and ease of application development.
Having said that I have seen some poorly designed and implemented systems that have not been reliable. However, this has never been the fault of Notes/Domino. Poorly designed systems perform poorly and this is a people problem not a Notes/Domino problem. The ND environment can not do everything, some applications are better designed and developed in a Relational DB. ND does not do Relational DB type applications well. Having said that I have developed some pretty good (if I don’t say so myself) relational like applications in ND. However, there comes a time when you have to walk away from an application and say that will not work well in ND!
Your comments do great dis-service to ND and many talented and creative ND developers. It’s like me blaming my car because I drove into w telephone post.
Subject: Willy Lorenzo is a Lotus Domino Legend…
I am sure Willy didn’t mean to do any disservice to creative ND Developers, Willy is a very creative ND developer. I mean he is a legend…
Willy Lorenzo has a brilliant mind and is sure to be fabulous developer. Back in the V2-V3 days… we had no @Sum function…Willy was known to all in the Partner’s forum as “The Great Wilfredo”, and came up with this awesome formula to sum a list of values…
Surely, some of you old timers remember “The Great Wilfredo”
I sure do! And I was in awe of him, like I am of Stan Rogers, Rocky Oliver, Andre, Wild Bill and so many others of todays Notes/Domino stars…
I only wish I could have met him before he was soured on Notes. Heck, I’d still love to meet him!
But, if you check this forum, he still gives his knowledge to other notes developers often.
For more information about the @Sum that Willy created…
read this:
http://www.keysolutions.com/NotesFAQ/howsum.html
Also…
http://www.lotusgeek.com/SapphireOak/LotusGeekBlog.nsf/D6Plinks/ROLR-6KHKE4