IBM WebSphere and Lotus: Implementing Collaborative Solutions

This book has definitely earned a place on my "arms reach" book shelf - in fact I am purchasing a copy to keep at home. A great read with easy to reference, up to date details. As an admin for a global Domino infrastructure, this book has offered great insight to the app-dev world of notes developers plus, the road ahead for WebSphere and open standards.

This is a great book for anyone to bridge the gap between Lotus and Websphere technologies. Well written, introduces and details topics nicely and is very up to date.Written from developers pov but Admins would also like the book.May be some talks about Wireless technogies - email, PIM and calendar (WebSphere Everyplace Access) would have given some more coverage to the book. Overall book is excellent read.

This book starts with an introduction to Notes and WebSphere, goes through installation, and architecture, then walks you through several technical scenarios. These include using Notes services, WAS, LDAP, among others. It also covers overall issues like performance, caching, and application design. The book is generally well written, though not as concise as the equivalent O'Reilly book. Screenshots are a little overused. The topic coverage level is fairly light. This is more of a field guide then a reference. If you are a J2EE developer or architect, you are starting a project that includes Notes, and you are starting from scratch, then you should take a look at this book to give you a survey of the territory.

IBM plans to combine as much as possible the advantages of its Lotus and WebSphere products. Lotus offers a cooperative environment, while WebSphere is excellent for running J2EE applications that are scalable and use transactions. The book goes into myriad details about this convergence. But there is one salient message. Lotus (and Domino) is moving towards WebSphere. The reason is that WebSphere is based upon the open standards of J2EE, and IBM strongly supports this. Whereas Lotus predates the Web, and is comprised mainly of proprietary standards. The book stresses that IBM is scarcely abandoning Lotus. The installed user base and third party applications built on top of it is too great for IBM to contemplate the revenue loss if it did so. Still, if you are a Lotus developer, this book is a harbinger. Collectively, Lotus developers are safe in the near term. But do you as an individual programmer want to get trapped in a stable or shrinking ghetto? Think this is unlikely? Then consider those people maintaining DEC's VMS machines. Now supported by HP. But VMS is an ever diminishing field. So the book can be valuable to Lotus developers. Somewhat of a tangent from the authors' intent, perhaps. Consider burnishing your skill set, and giving yourself some insurance, by learning Java and J2EE. Or even C# and .NET.