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lotus-notes
Damian Cugley’s Weblog
We have a client who decided that a shared ‘document library’ was the way to collaborate on a bug list. They gave me a URL and said to log in with my full name.
Obviously they did not really mean my full name, which they do not even know. I tried every combination of p, d, damian, cugley and the more obvious misspellings I could think of, to no avail. Eventually I logged in using a colleague’s name. This was not really Lotus Notes’s fault.
The next thing I saw was a frameset. What’s bad about framesets is that they make it difficult to bookmark documents, or to link to them from other web documents (such as my work log). In this case the frameset served to present navigation links which were present at the bottom of every page anyway.
Actually I lied—there were no navigation links. Instead there was a grey rectangle (a Java applet) and a 1997-style Photoshopped backdrop. The other frame held two grey rectangles. After some hefty disc activity, they all displayed error messages about missing classes. Feh. I did not see the proper layout until I tried it again in Phoenix. (I’m impressed that Gecko’s Java support is now more stable than MSIE’s!)
So: a fancy Java applet in order to display a list of links. Someone should have told Lotus that HTML can already do that. The content frame is another list of links. Thanks to their clever Java applet (a) I must double-click the links to make them work, and (b) I cannot copy & paste text from the page.
The links to the document pages are truly horrible—dozens of hexadecimal digits followed by ?openDocument, which ensures it cannot be cached (since our proxy does not trust URLs containing question marks to be idempotent and safe).
I spent the rest of the morning copying their bug reports in to my schedule so I can consult them without visiting Lotusland.
