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Comment by kevinSuttle | Hacker News Reader

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kevinSuttle·

Very few people know this, even inside of IBM:

Notes is literally an Eclipse plugin.

There. Now you can really hate it and feel totally justified.

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Maybe it is now? Notes predates eclipse by quite a few years.

Notes used to be a native-ish desktop app. The UI had a native Windows implementation but Notes had a distinctive Notes UI look and feel. It wasn't that great, and pretty horrid on a Macintosh. The architecture was well-separated in that every Notes node was a UI layer and a Notes server, and would have supported truly native UIs. The Eclipsification of the Notes UI was not an improvement, and bloated the heck out of it.

Notes had an app development platform and runtime for forms, workflow and things like that. Adding Eclipse muddled that aspect of the architecture, too.

I was at Lotusphere the year Notes 4 was announced and we gave it a standing ovation.

If you'd ever worked with Notes 3 you would know why.

After switching from Mac to Windows 95 in the mid 90s, I always felt like the Notes desktop interface was a bad rip-off of Apple's At Ease interface. [1]

Having said that, I was always a big fan of Notes/Domino even though the UI sucked hard. This is probably because I was a huge fan of Filemaker Pro on the Mac, and Notes, more than anything else (including Access), felt like the closest thing on Windows.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Ease

Front end or back end?

Front end. The back end architecture hasn't changed much in decades.

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