Brightline Promises Easy Domino/J2EE Coexistence

At Lotusphere later this month, the Portsmouth, N.H.-based company will officially unveil the Brightline Application Server Enterprise Edition, which claims to pack full J2EE capabilities into a browser-sized footprint. That's tiny enough that the app server can run on the same box as Domino itself, according to Brightline President and founder Jim Wilson. It also promises that dyed-in-the-wool Domino admins will be able to add J2EE capabilities to their beloved platform painlessly.

"We're coming at this from the Domino perspective versus pitching Domino as a back-end resource," said Wilson, who spent several years at the independent Lotus Development Corp. and then at IBM-owned Lotus.

Wilson was careful to position Brightline's offerings - it will also launch a portal server later this year - as complementary, not competitive with IBM's own WebSphere-Domino integration plans.

"We're going after not the J2EE developer, but the Notes administrator," he noted. Brightline customers are more likely to be at departmental level whereas IBM's WebSphere/Domino game plan is more enterprise-focused. Where some have declared the Domino installed base to be a dying breed, Wilson maintains there are at least 73 million active Domino/Notes users, most of which plan to stay put on the collaboration/e-mail platform.

"This lets Notes/Domino shops add J2EE capabilities and start using them quickly without making a huge infrastructure purchase that takes a lot of consulting," Wilson said. The app server, to ship in the first quarter, will cost $2,500 and incorporate standard Tomcat and JBoss technologies. IBM WebSphere Advanced Application Server, by contrast, costs $10,000.

Wilson said testers have brought up their first application in 15 minutes, a claim seconded by Andrew Pollack, president of Northern Collaborative Technologies, a Lotus business partner based in Cumberland, Maine.

"Brightline lets us add J2EE components to enhance what we've already got without buying hundreds of thousands of dollars in software. It lets us take our existing apps and add the last bit we need for additional scalability and thus get in synch with the J2EE-focused IT people. The Domino apps are no longer islands," he said.

The issue for Domino developers is that they have a long history using that product's rich toolset whereas Java tools are relatively new. "No one disputes the value of Java and particularly J2EE enhancements, but Domino developers have been able to do the things that these tools bring to the rest of the world for some time so they question why they should bother spending time and money on some very expensive server platforms when they can already provide very effective, low-cost solutions with Domino," Pollack said.

This is hardly a moot point for the Domino faithful. Two years go at Lotusphere, Lotus rocked their world when it said the guts of Notes/Domino would transition over to WebSphere and DB2 technologies. Lotus executives have since scrambled to recoup the damage. Particularly in the last few months, they have gone out of their way to state that Domino and Notes client code bases will be updated well into the future. (For more on the product road map see CRN story.)

"They're talking Version 7 and Version 8, I've never seen that happen before," Pollack noted.

After years in which IBM Software seemed to disdain both the Lotus brand and technology, and championed IBM technology for purposes for which it was not suited, the company appears to have reversed course. IBM has really "resurfaced the Lotus brand in the last year and particularly in the last six months around WorkPlace. Lotus has gotten a lot more cache even within IBM," said David Marshak, senior vice president of the Patricia Seybold Group, a Boston researcher.