Unleash AJAX

Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical

Recently, I realized a major shortcoming with Lotus Notes. As you could probably imagine, businesses deal with lotsa transactions everyday, and to get a head of competitors, they need to make sense outta these daily transactions. These transactions can be in any form, but I’ll take the simplest example: sales data.

What I’ve learned from my industry training, is that when you give a product to a client, every user of that product would have differing requirements. For the project that I was under, we spent an hour or so discussing with the client about the reporting functions of the product (implemented with Lotus Notes). Amongst the problems are:

  • Existing reports need to be updated, due to changing user requirements.
  • As only a few users were involved in the discussion, we were unaware of the needs of other users.
  • The “reports” in Lotus Notes are basically views (tables) that are grouped according to certain criterias. As the users were afraid that there were too many views, they had to “design” views that satisfy a number of requirements. In other words, to get certain statistic, users would need to do some simple “exploration” or “calculation”. The system was unable to spoon feed them with the exact info they need.

The worst technical limitation with Notes is that it’s entirely server based. Although users can use JavaScript, but the Notes/Domino architecture was pretty server-centric. For example, if you wanted to do some formatting on fields for display on a report, it’ll have to be done on the server. JavaScript is mainly used for data validation on a web client.

Well, this is what AJAX (and JavaScript) is developed for: to shift processing away from the server. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a JavaScript client that could allow users to quickly sort and group data according to their needs? Better still, allow the user to apply filters on the results.. That way, users are in complete power over the reporting of vast amounts of data. More importantly, it will significantly reduce server load, allowing a single server to serve more clients, and of course, each user will get better response times from the server.

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Permalink | April 18th, 2007

2 Responses to “Unleash AJAX”

  1. Eyrique Says:
    April 19th, 2007 at 12:23 am

    Wow! So you did learn something! Btw, what does Lotus Notes do? I see a lot of the words but I am still not very sure if its functionality.

  2. Jonathan Ng Says:
    April 19th, 2007 at 8:57 pm

    Lotus Notes itself, is basically a mail client, like Outlook and Thunderbird. In addition to that however, is it’s ability to build simple applications rapidly (the server component is called Domino). It’s like a souped up version of Access - the ability to script etc.

    Although it’s convenient (as in very easy) to create certain applications, it’s got severe limitations. Developers need to do a lot of workarounds to achieve things that are otherwise very straightforward with other technologies like .NET.

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