TexasSwede

Lately I have been thinking back on my career. You may have read my two postings about how I started with Notes and how I started with computers in general. This made me start thinking: what is it with Lotus Notes that I find so fascinating?

I remember how impressed I was with Visual Basic when the first version came out in 1991. I had previously been writing code using Turbo Pascal, QuickC and Turbo C, so a tool that let you draw the user interface and place controls in a graphic way was a big thing.

I used Visual Basic for several years, I may have been among the few programmers going from C and Pascal to Basic... But in a business environment it makes sense to use a tool that let you build application fast and efficient, not spending days to code the user interface.

While I worked as a journalist in the 1990's, I looked at many other tools as well, like PowerBuilder, Delphi, Visual Café (a Java development tool from Symantec which later got bought by Borland and integrated into JBuilder). I realized that this kind of RAD tool is what I should learn.

That I ended up working with Notes was more luck than skill, though, as you can read in my other blog entry.

The great thing with Notes is that I get so much for free. The user interface is mostly there, I just have to design the forms and views, set some colors and then I can write the business logic. All the database functionality is there, etc. What is there not to like? Well, we all know there are a few things that can be improved, but overall, Notes is a very powerful development platform...