Whenever we talk to customers looking to migrate their custom Notes applications to another platform, the developers hone in on the issue of how to deal with the Lotusscript. They know that if you have dozens, hundreds or in some cases thousands of Notes apps that is the issue. If you cannot automate this conversion then you cannot migrate with any level of efficiency and affordability.
DOCOVA V5 will convert Lotusscript for both the front end and the back end.
In the front end (user interface, buttons and such) @formula language is converted to $$Formula language which will run on both the Domino and SQL versions of DOCOVA. For example @Username is converted to $$Username. If it is LotusScript then it is converted to our front-end JavaScript which has a similar object model to Notes by design. For example, LotusScript has uiworkspace, uidocument objects and so does our front-end JavaScript equivalent.
Back-end LotusScript is converted to PHP from the Notes backend object model to our backend object model. This is similar to the Notes object model, on purpose. For example: LotusScript has NotesDocument and NotesView and more, and we convert those to DocovaDocument and DocovaView for example. This allows developers to easily learn and code in DOCOVA since it has similar constructs they were used to in Notes/Domino.
This is a big differentiator between DOCOVA and other migration alternatives. We have these surrogate objects that were unique to Lotus Notes to make up for objects in Notes/Domino. When you are in SQL, you don’t need them to build new applications, but from a Notes application migration point of view they are helpful. Other systems migrate the designs, but the things that are unique to Notes do not come across. Additionally, after applications are migrated to the DOCOVA platform, they can continue to be managed and enhanced with a designer tool that is easy to use. With DOCOVA V5 it handles everything from access control to easily modifying migrated applications to rapidly building new applications.
At this point in time DOCOVA V5 has not been released. We have two customer migration projects on the go where the customers are working with us to move the development forward. One customer has 8 custom Notes applications, the other over 200.
In terms of front-end and back-end LotusScript, we’ve implemented the base conversion engine and new DOCOVA API. But every company is different, every Notes application is different and so there is still a lot of ongoing work that will be done over time to make code conversions more seemless. Our goal is to convert Notes application faster and more completely than anyone else….which is a huge time and cost savings to our customers. We hope to crack the nut of how to migrate customers who have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of Notes applications.
