Notes users gain migration options

The ripple effect of IBM's decision to move Lotus Notes and Domino to a Java platform has produced yet another offering that claims to give IT executives an alternative to Big Blue's plans.

Start-up ToJava last week introduced itself and unveiled a set of tools by the same name for cloning Notes applications so they can run on a Java 2 platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform. ToJava supports Lotus customers giving in to IBM's move to Java, but it gives them the option of thumbing their nose at IBM's WebSphere and picking any J2EE platform. The ToJava tools also include the ToJava Engine, which provides connectivity to the Notes Storage Facility (NSF) while data is being migrated to a relational database back end.

"ToJava gives you the functionality that Notes gives you," says Hersel Ahdout, senior developer and system designer for GoProjex, which develops a project management application called GoProject/CRE to manage real estate projects for corporations. "It takes the contents of Notes forms and builds Java Beans." Ahdout says the ToJava tools can shave 60% to 70% off the development time it takes to convert Notes applications to Java.

"We decided we were going to switch our application to the Java platform, and ToJava makes sense for our purposes. It also means we don't have to wait for IBM to come up with a migration plan," he says.

ToJava joins two other projects designed to give Notes users some alternatives. The first is an open source project called Crimson that is led by the Notes Open Source Software Organization. Crimson is designed to replace the Java Server Pages (JSP) engine IBM yanked from Lotus Domino R6, set to ship later this year.

Also, a company called Jagre has developed a tool called Jasper that works with the Domino Designer application development environment and lets JSPs be added to Notes databases. Once added, the JSPs can be replicated throughout a Notes network, another feature that IBM yanked from the forthcoming release of Notes.

But while those two efforts are for keeping users on Domino, ToJava is offering a migration path off the platform.

ToJava has a Java-based library that contains objects for fields, forms and views, constructs that are familiar to Notes developers. It also includes a set of JSP tag libraries for building Domino-like front ends. It has a middleware library that contains Notes-like APIs. ToJava also clones Notes security, offering document-level and roles-based security.

The ToJava Engine server is middleware to connect a Notes database to applications running on a J2EE server.

"The engine helps in migrations because Notes, DB2, Oracle and other relational databases can co-exist as you evolve off of Notes," says Chen Lin, CEO and co-founder of ToJava. Lin is a former IBM consultant who once worked on integrating Notes and relational databases.

Lin says the ToJava tool kit also has generic Java-based collaboration features such as calendaring and e-mail that can be used with converted Notes applications. He says the benefits of ToJava are that it ports Notes applications to a platform that can scale, it lets users port data and applications to a widely used Web-based technology, and the effort is being led by Notes veterans such as himself.

ToJava costs $3,000 for an unlimited number of application deployments on a single Web application server. The software is available now.