TexasSwede

At least this guy didn't blame the Lotus Notes application when his printer ran out of paper.

140000 lines of code!??!?!

That's about 22000 lines of code a year. The longest script library I currently have active is about 2000 lines long -- so this guy made the equivalent of 10 of those a year!?

This screams to me that there's a whole bunch of really, REALLY bad code in there. Probably a lot of NotesDatabase.Search lines followed by .GetNthDocument and some NotesDocument.~$Readers = "yadda"

No custom application on a PC platform can survive 12 years without a refactor and still be considered efficient. If you built a website in 1996, would it's operation be state of the art today? If you worked with a native OS at the time it would be Windows 95! The biggest competing platforms for coder attention in the IT workplace were Visual Basic and PowerBuilder, not .NET and J2EE.

It sounds to me like this is a company that has never considered the idea of refactoring the app, whether on the Notes platform or some other platform, for the good of their users. If it's an order configurator that likely runs their business, they probably endure tens of millions of dollars of lost productivity for users of the app simply because they don't want to invest in it.

And that's the lever that this guy needs to use: "Here is our opportunity cost by working with this essentially broken application for the last decade. Here's what it would cost to modernize it. As you can see, the ROI is about 2 months."

Hell, I'd go to the CFO with alternative platform pitches as well. Even if you have to suggest jumping platforms, at least run the numbers -- because even a switch to J2EE would probably have strong ROI for them at this point.

I've known plenty of customer situations like this, and usually the reason why there's no proper refactoring is because a) no one has shown ROI impact; or b) the company believes it's working on something that's replacing the aging system already. (I know one customer that refuses to deploy substantial changes because the Notes system is going away in 6 months -- they've been making that claim for at least the last 5 years.)

Man, a basic design set out in 4.5. So Lotusscript was in its infancy. There was no native Java support. Domino could render to a web browser, but AJAX was totally unheard of. You didn't have embedded views, or editors, or layers, or alternating rows colors in views. I'm not sure there were Image Resources that far back. Certainly there was no XML processing.

I really want to know who this guy worked for. I need to go make a sales call.

@Nathan: The posting IP was 194.51.44.2 and a IP lookup gives gw.tokheim.com. Going to www.tokheim.com shows it is a manufacturing company, so it seems like he posted from work.

Intersting fact: "tok" in Swedish means "crazy (person)" or "fool". :-)
And "heim" in German (and "hem" in Swedish) of course means "home". Would you like to work for a company called "home of the crazies"? ;-)

@Nathan: By the way, I wrote a editorial system in the end of 1997 for Computer Sweden, the magazine I worked for before moving to the US. It was still in use last summer, surviving at least 2 (of not more) attempts to replace it with a "professional" (purchased) system. Sure, it still looks like it was built in 4.6, but it was (is?) fast and efficient. There is not much complicated code, the main code is in the export functions to generate Quark Express files, and I am sure that part has changed when they switched editing platforms. They been doing some small modifications/adjustments, but it was (is?) largely unchanged since 1997. Now they are running Notes 7, AFAIK.

But otherwise I agree, more complex applications need to be refactored every few years.

I think "Notes Floats My Boat" therefore I am (a Notes lover).

I have even made a screensaver of it that can be downloaded at:
Notes Floats My Boat

This would be a fun Lotusphere mini event. The setup could be just like McCain's medical records review. For 4 hours interested developers can view this database(s) on lab machines. No phones (camera), no usb drives allowed in the room; nothing that could potentially copy the code. Only pen and paper to take notes. A birds of a feather would immediately follow to discuss.

@Nathan; I wonder sometimes how people come up with the "lines of code" count of Notes databases. I hope they aren't basing it on a count of the design synopsis. For grins I did one on the v7 catalog.nsf, pasted the Ctrl+a into notepad then word... 167 pages. Thats a but load of meta.

@Yancy: That's a great idea. En extension of what Mary Beth did last Lotusphere, where we could bring in applications and the UI team looked at it and came with commenst on the design.
But to actually have developers look at an application and give feedback on the design, that would be really neat. Of course, it has to be retricted to a couple of applications. Why not have 2 or 3 problematic applications brought in, and they can be looked at by different people?
A kind of "peer review". I think that would be very interesting, a kind of "best practices/worst practices" on a real life application.