What's so damn good about Eclipse in Lotus Notes 8?

The company I support is finally going to upgrade to Lotus Notes 8. This thing is a total pig for memory and most of the “features” it adds above 7 are useless. The RSS feed is a joke, the “Open” button is a waste of a mouse click, and the thumbnail view is so slow to open on their machines that you can cycle through a dozen tabs faster (I could go on). Running nlnotes.exe instead of notes.exe loads everything except the fluffy crap and the Eclipse framework. It also uses less than 1/3 the memory. In fact, it looks almost exactly like Lotus Notes 7. I’ve talked to several of the other 2nd level techs and they don’t see any advantage to the user beyond the supposedly better search. That leaves the Eclipse framework as the primary reason for using up so goddamn much memory. Assuming that our developers aren’t planning to write the ultra widget that makes Lotus Notes magically not suck for once, what is so awesome about it?

I’m sorry, did you just ask what was awesome about any part of Notes?

NOTHING. The answer is NOTHING.

Agreed.

I didn’t even know they still made Lotus Notes.

We’re stuck with it. I hate the damn thing, but I know how to fix it when it breaks. In about two weeks they’re going to push it onto PCs with all the useless crap included (except for the open office stuff), and I need someone to justify the other side of the argument before I get fired for disabling it on every PC I encounter.

Wait, they built a productivity app for non dev users on the ECLIPSE FRAMEWORK?

Unless the goal is to make people want PC upgrades via excessive bloat, I can’t imagine a reason for that. Eclipse is a nicely portable IDE for a variety of languages but it’s a serious resource hog.

As someone who finally migrated off of Notes this last year for thousands and thousands of mailboxes … there is NOTHING good about Eclipse. It’s yet again, more showboating and posturing by IBM to try to show value over moving to either an open solution, or Exchange. You would not believe the enjoyment and “thank you” emails we got from users worldwide after switching off of Notes.

We threw a huge party the day we killed off the last Domino server. Do not want, ever again.

Oh, how I wish it was just email. This company uses Lotus Notes for web publishing, document sharing, scheduling, application development, security, blah blah blah. One of the devs told me a few minutes ago that they’re planning on building a “collaboration environmant” using Eclipse. I’m pretty sure what he was saying is “lube up and get ready for the butt hurt, because it’s coming and you can’t stop it”.

Oh jeez. Please, please talk some sense into the person letting them continue to do app development on Notes. We had to have a moratorium on that for over a year before we finally said “no more.” But that being said, a lot of the “hurt” is a smokescreen. If you were to move to Exchange, Microsoft has a lot of tools and help to provide to get things up and running on that and Communicator, Live Meeting, integration with scheduled resources, etc. It’s safe to say the big hold up is the apps piece.

There might be some icing on the cake as well if you wanted to kill off hosting your own environment. All of that would be available both hosted via servers there, or with Microsoft’s new MOS, which is their hosted solution, with network tie-in to you. We went from 80 servers to none internally, and from about 20+ support team to about 3 internal, and those are only for front line support, with MS providing the second tier.

Trust me, I do not miss Notes right now. I feel for ya though Cat.

Man, I’ve only ever thought about Eclipse as a Java IDE with kinda-half-baked C/C++ plugins and haven’t used it in quite a while. Has it become an emacs-ish OS-unto-itself?

Ironically, our Notes admin was laid off on Monday. In order to increase my visibility / importance, I volunteered to take over responsibility for Domino. I’ve never felt more secure in my job (the other stuff I manage is very important, but is also running like clockwork).

But yes, Notes sucks.

That sucks that they are going to double up your responsibility but I hope things go well for you Balasarius. Do you think the layoff was related to an upcoming mail change or just a standard business cycle thing?

It was just revenue, or lack thereof. We had a mass layoff, and two people in our dept. of 14-15 got hit. The Notes guy was a real ass, difficult to work with. Word is he even burned his bridge on the way out the door and lost his reference. Unwise.

Nope, we’re stuck with notes for at least another 12 months, but probably forever. As much as we bitch about it, its design and obscurity makes it less likely to be victim of a virus / malware attack than Exchange.

Very true. We’ve been somewhat lucky on the layoffs so far. All the interns are gone (there goes the scenery) but the crusty admins are all still intact. Next round might be worse though. I got a call from my buddy at my last job and they were gutted within IT, over 25% in that department alone.

I’m using Notes now. It is certainly one of the worst applications ever built in any language for any purpose. It actually takes almost 10 minutes to come up on first boot on my laptop. Email and a calendar for heaven’s sake, and a bunch of crappy collaboration features that quite possibly no one outside IBM has ever used. Currently using 240 megabytes of RAM on my machine between notes2w and nlnotes. Even 24 MB would be too much for this POS program.

Anyhow, Notes is the one thing in the world that makes Microsoft look good.

Hah, you’ve seen nothing. They built sametime (IBM’s instant messaging software) on the eclipse framework. It is a beast. Slow, will randomly lock up for 10-15sec for no reason, etc. Eclipse is a great IDE (not RAD! Just eclipse) but don’t make an IM client out of it!

Don’t forget the Sametime server also randomly deciding to shit the bed.

They don’t call it “Sometime” for nothing. ;)

Heh, that’s the joy of our setup. The server is still v3 or something like that. Bwhahah.

Wait, what? Sametime isn’t obviously Eclipse-based, but it is obviously Java-based, and it seems like it’s doing that old-fashionedy Java GC thing when it pauses randomly and loses all your typing.

(Or, as I’d say on Sametime: pauses ranyping.)

It might be GC causing the pauses, yes. But it is very much eclipse based (at least client versions 7.x and above). I’m not on a system with it at the moment, but I think it is easy enough to go to the install dir and see all the various eclipse framework class files strewn about. The client is much much heavier than it needs to be - probably because we only use 5% of its features, so the rest is wasted. I just want timestamps, and that didn’t come until 7.x (the much faster 3.x client lacks quite a bit…)