IBM Corp’s Lotus Development Corp is giving its entire product line a Java makeover, starting with Lotus Domino 4.5 – the next cut of Notes due by the year-end. With that version, Notes clients will be able to execute Java applets and the Domino server will be able to serve pages that contain Java applets or contain scripting languages such as VBScript or JavaScript, which is slightly different from being a full-blown applet server. The company also laid out its Java plans for the next full release of Domino, due sometime next year, but this being Internet time, Lotus could not risk waiting until its Lotusphere97 gathering in January to tell everyone, although it did promise more details then. Lotus VP marketing for Notes and Domino Tim Dempsey described the clutch of announcement as the hill Lotus has to climb to stay competitive. Lotus reaffirmed it’s commitment to the Object Management Group’s Internet Inter-Orb Protocol (IIOP) whereby it will use IIOP as the way Java classes will access Domino applications. It will make the object store, messaging and other Notes application services available to Java applets. Lotus intends to deliver Java applets that will present a Notes front- end within a browser. The Notes development environment will enable developers to write client-side Java applets. Meantime, Lotus is busy building a set of tools, which sounds a bit like Office, but based on JavaSoft’s Java Beans component architecture. Lotus already has a set of similar ActiveX controls. The next Notes clients and server will be Notes containers and publishers respectively. Lotus also said the next Notes client would ship with both Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. The agreement with both companies stretches to any and all of Lotus’ products, and it will decide in time which ones will contain the browsers.
