Leadership By Numbers

Category IBM/Lotus Domino Open Source


InfoQ has just published an interview with Damien Katz, now at IBM working on Apache CouchDb.

CouchDb is a distributed document database system built on a web architecture, which Damien sees as influenced by his familiarity with Lotus Notes:

So, it's most like Lotus Notes because I worked so many years on Lotus Notes, I got a really good grasp on Lotus Notes' whole platform, and what is actually good about it . . . . So there is something there and I felt like I had a pretty good idea of the core of Lotus Notes what was actually powerful about that, so that's what I tried to extract down and make it in CouchDB. It was that document model. So it definitely works most like Lotus Notes

Exchange wanted to be something like that a long time ago, they had the Exchange server, they had this concept with shared folders where you were supposed to build the applications on that. And that never really worked out, nobody really used it for that, so there have been other attempts to build things like that and then of course anything on the web like a SharePoint works very much like Lotus Notes, but it's a single instance web server of Lotus Notes and you use your browser client, but it's still doing a lot of the same things, it still is very document oriented type of environment. So there have been other things but Lotus Notes is in my mind the only thing that really got it right

CouchDb is impressive, but I'm even more stuck that IBM is advancing the project on an open-source platform. I'm fascinated by the potential for CouchDb and wondering about the interplay and synergy with Lotus Notes. Of course, you can read about it at Damien's own blog which has other links, as well.

Technorati Tags: Damien Katz, CouchDB, Lotus Notes