| If a company is building Web applications that focus on collaboration, Domino has many benefits. Domino excels when an application requires sophisticated collaborative capabilities, such as workflow, distributed content authoring, or deals with a lot of unstructured data or knowledge. Likewise, if a company is building a Web site that needs to handle many transactions or requires the use of Enterprise Java components , then WebSphere provides significant benefits. WebSphere excels when an application requires industrial-strength transaction management, massive scalability, or where business logic is wholly encapsulated in distributed components, such as servlets or Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs). Many companies are now finding that they need Web sites that require both of these capabilities. Domino and WebSphere can work together over the same or separate Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) stacks to deliver the best of both worlds . For example, one customer has built an application that uses a Domino workflow infrastructure to implement content management for its Web site catalog. Domino-based workflow and collaboration software is used to manage the content generation and content approval process for catalog entries and prices. The highly scalable transaction services of WebSphere are used in tandem to implement the actual catalog site. Domino messaging is used to send confirmation information to the customer and maintain the dialog with the customer. This book addresses strategies of merging Domino and WebSphere application functions to develop powerful Web sites. Development along J2EE lines is stressed. This book was written to have a primarily role as a developer's reference ”and as such, the use of tools such as WebSphere Studio is emphasized . However, Web infrastructure, including network bandwidth considerations, high availability, clustering, performance, and scalability considerations, all have a significant place in the text. The book includes the following topics: -
What to put on WebSphere Application Servers (WAS ”pronounced "waz") vs. Domino (for example, JavaServer Pages or JSPs vs. Domino forms, servlets vs. agents , or WAS vs. Domino servlet engine) -
Accessing J2EE elements from Domino (for example, Java from LotusScript, JSP tag library for Domino elements, or XML) -
Accessing Domino from J2EE (Domino classes from Java or Web services access to Domino, for example) -
Development tools (WSAD, Eclipse plug-ins for Domino development, Domino Designer features for J2EE development) -
Use of the WebSphere Studio Development Platform -
Issues related to WAS and Domino together: Single Sign-on (SSO), clustering, performance, high availability, and so on -
The role of the new Lotus Workplace components in implementing WebSphere and Lotus Collaboration solutions -
The role of the WebSphere Portal Server in implementing WebSphere and Lotus Collaboration solutions A real-world case study that uses WebSphere, Domino, and several Lotus Collaboration tools is discussed in Chapters 13 and 15. That real-world example is IBM's On Demand Service (ODS) offerings for Lotus Collaboration Applications, which are good examples of IBM's hosted offerings in the on demand era. These offerings are hosted at IBM On Demand Center (ODC) server farms, such as the IBM ODC in Boulder, Colorado. The On Demand Lotus Collaboration applications include Web Conferencing, Instant Messaging, Web Mail, and Lotus TeamRoom. These On Demand Service offerings are hosted offerings designed to allow multiple customers to securely share hardware resources. Security access controls restrict customers to specific virtual resources. The On Demand Lotus Collaboration offerings are based on a set of IBM Software Group software products including Tivoli Monitoring, Tivoli Storage Management (TSM), IBM Directory Server (used as an LDAP directory), WebSphere Application Server (WAS), IBM/Lotus Web Conferencing 6.5.1 with the Enterprise Meeting Server (EMS) option, Lotus Instant Messaging, Lotus Workplace Messaging, Lotus TeamRoom, WebSphere Everyplace Subscription Manager (WESM), DB/2, WebSphere MQ server, and Domino 6. These offerings utilize IBM's new Universal Management Infrastructure (UMI) at the IBM Boulder On Demand Center. The billing model is based on connection time and/or maximum concurrent users. The design includes Gigabit speeds to the Internet and the use of cluster technology for all components that allow applications to scale to a very large number of customers. IBM is using hardware SSL Accelerators and Load Balancers to maximize performance. The IBM design team worked closely with the team that designed Lotus Web conferencing for IBM internal use and many "lessons learned" were shared. Although the IBM internal implementation of Lotus Web Conferencing was designed primarily for internal use, we also invite many customers to Web conferences on this system. Since all users must be registered with userid and password, the IBM LDAP directory to authenticate for this Web conference collaboration system has over 2 million names (including 340,000 IBMers), so it definitely falls into the high-volume, high-capacity collaboration system based on WebSphere, Domino, and Lotus Collaboration tools. The case studies in Chapters 13 and 15 discuss the details of the design and architecture for all of these high-volume, high-availability, high-performance, on demand collaboration offerings. |
