Likelihood to Recommend Domino is best in medium-sized businesses of 20-100 employees. It's too complicated to implement in very small companies unless you have good external resources. It scales up very well for larger companies but the pressures of users wanting particular "brand-name" software can become difficult. If you want a restricted "extranet/portal" system for a limited set of members it's a great system, particularly if you add a Domino CRM on top. Unlike Microsoft, you never have to resort to command-line tools, like PowerShell, in Domino to get things done.
Read full review Oracle Java SE is well suited to long-running applications (e.g. servers). Java Swing (UI toolkit) is now rather outdated, lacking support for modern UI features. JavaFX, the potential replacement for Swing, has now been separated out of Java core. Ideally, there would be a path to migrate a large application incrementally from Swing to JavaFX, but due to different threading models and other aspects, it is difficult. At this point, it is probably better to use an embedded web browser (e.g. JxBrowser) to provide a modern UI in HTML/Javascript and keep just the business logic in Java.
Read full review Pros Domino support for policy-based user registration and deployment eases end-user creation. User access to databases is simplified via group membership and defined roles. Email replication to clustered servers is simplified through connection/replication documents stored centralized address book Group calendaring enabled at client level controls. Read full review Plenty support built into the tool and IDE like Maven, Ant, Eclipse, IntelliJ. Strong object-orientation language and clear project structure. Wrapper underlines hardware and memory management so the developers can focus on business and implementation. It offers a huge library and framework support from third-parties and the community. Read full review Cons User interface needs to be modernised. Read full review Commercial Licensing in 2019. Oracle will charge commercial organizations using Java SE for upgrading to the latest bug fixes and updates. Organizations will now need to either limit their implementation of Java SE or may need to drop it altogether. Slow Performance. Due to the all of the abstraction of the JVM, Java SE programs take much more resources to compile and run compared to Python. Poor UI appearance on all of the major GUI libraries (Swing, SWT, etc.). Through Android Studio, it is easy to get a native look/feel for Java apps, but when it comes to desktops, the UI is far from acceptable (does not mimic the native OS's look/feel at all). Read full review Usability The language is fluent and has good support from a number of open source and commercial IDEs. Language features are added every 6 months, although long-term service releases are only available every 3 years. It would be nice if some of the older APIs were depreciated with more pressure to move to the new replacement APIs (e.g. File vs. Path), but transitions to new features are generally well implemented.
Read full review Support Rating Java is such a mature product at this point that there is little support from the vendor that is needed. Various sources on the internet, and especially StackOverflow, provide a wealth of knowledge and advice. Areas that may benefit from support is when dealing with complex multithreading issues and security libraries.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We use
SharePoint , SQL and Teams but only for the things that they excel in. For example, we use teams for small team interactions (including external participants). We use teams for meetings too. We've discovered that Teams collaboration is not as full-functional as Domino and more importantly, that our members (financial services) do not trust the Open Office365 cloud.
SharePoint and Team collaborative features are often blocked in our member organizations. Domino is much easier to identify and unblock at the firewall level. It's much easier to restrict collaboration to approved options in Domino.
Read full review Chose to go with Java instead of Python or C++ due to the expertise on the ground with the technology, for its ease of integration with our heterogeneous setup of production servers, and for the third party library support which we've found was able to address some challenging aspects of our business problem.
Read full review Return on Investment The immediate impact on my organization as a non-profit is cost. Enterprise pricing for a Domino solution is exponentially more inexpensive than more popular applications. Of the most obvious impacts is user familiarity. Given a vast majority of the employment pool having familiarity with MS products, orienting new employees to Domino\Notes is burdensome. Adoption is slow and resistance is high. Hiring Domino administrators and developers is increasingly challenging. The recent sale of the Domino platform away from IBM is concerning. Read full review The different versions make it harder to work with other companies where some use newer versions while some use older versions, costing time to make them compatible. Licenses are getting to be costly, forcing us to consider OpenJDK as an alternative. New features take time to learn. When someone starts using them, everyone has to take time to learn. Read full review ScreenShots