Conspicuous Absence

I felt compelled to make this entry just for the record. If you scroll the entries of this blog, you will see a time line with a big hole: what happened to 2010? Well, my Lotus work went dormant for about a year. Why? Good question. Looking back here's a bit of background and a quick synopses of what transpired.

In 2009 I really tried pushing my Notes/Domino development career into high gear. If you recall ND 8 came into the world late 2007, 8.5 in late 2008. Having the Eclipse client now was great, but I was waiting for projects using X-Pages and DDE. I had done a little Java development starting in 7, but really thought these new features in 8.x were going to be the afterburner Notes needed to really take off. I pitched alot of new ideas to management and even to some outsiders, but I think a combination of not sharing my vision and a tough economy combined into nothing much materializing.

What to do then? Well, an opportunity came along to do some data warehousing/business intelligence projects. However, there really wasn't any money allocated for it. Fortunaetly for me there are some great open source products in this category. So for the past year I have immersed myself in a different, yet not all too unfamiliar world:

• I needed a SQL database that was serious enough for a big job. I found MySQL to be powerful enough for the job. Quest TOAD for MySQL was an invaluable tool for working with MySQL.
• I needed a server to run it on. Fortunately, we run Vmware ESX so I could use the images available from Bitnami.
• I needed an ETL tool. I evaluated many good ones and chose Talend Open Studio mainly because it runs in Eclipse. This thing is amazing and I even got it to connect to Notes via XML. (subject of a future post perhaps?)
• I needed a report tool and chose Jaspersoft's JasperServer and their tool iReport. (Currently runs in NetBeans, but an Eclipse version is in 0.x releases).
• I needed to understand BI and Data Warehouses and I landed on Dr. Ralph Kimball and his Dimensional Data Warehouse (based on the star schema). This is a very powerful way to structure data and is amazingly fast with queries.
• Altova DatabaseSpy turned out to be the only tool I spent some money on. It's not an ERWIN, but did does a great job with my data models.

These are all really cool tools and I was able to accomplish quite alot. Obviously I learned alot about Data Warehousing. Also, my Java skills are getting stronger as alot of these tools use Java to script in. My Linux skills are getting stronger (Ubuntu server) too. I'm also stronger in my understanding of XML. Finally, I got a taste for Cloud Computing and really want to explore Amazon AWS. Although the open source versions of these tools are great, their paid-for versions are even nicer (at a price still way less than than the big boys).

Where does that leave Notes and Domino? I think I haven't lost much time, as it appears that the rest of the world is finally catching up with the new features introduced in 8.5 I still haven't done an official XPages project, but am angling to do one (I like the idea that XPages is a servelet and is extensible). I have done a Notes web service consumer in Java and that turned out to be pretty interesting.

So I haven't abandoned the platform -- in fact I'd say it is probably in the best condition its ever been in. This much I know: going into 2011, I have way more options available to me than I did a year ago.