XPages Application Server – awesome idea!
26. Mai 2011
Ed Brill recently announced that IBM will ship an XPages Application Server in Q3/2011. He made this announcement in Bonn/Germany at the latest DNUG. It’s such a fantastic announcement and it made me think there will be a huge discussion starting soon after DNUG about what this server must contain or provide, what it shouldn’t and what the licencing model will be. To my surprise this discussion has not started yet (or I have missed it entirely). Anyway, here are my thoughts and wishes:
- An XPages Application Server must be an offering to win new customers which do not run a Domino environment yet
- It has to be a low price solution that can be sold as a topic to existing XPages apps
- Server administration and maintenance should be very easy
- Server licence should include unlimited user licence
- No mail and calendaring capabilities but SMTP Mail Routing to send Emails to existing mail environment
- Only web browser clients allowed (forget XPiNC!)
- …
I am really curious what you expect from such a server. Does anyone agree or disagree with my list? Feel free to add your thoughts.
I agree with you and I would add that this specific server does not follow the PVU scheme. Fixed price, whatever hardware you use, so it will be scalable without busting license budget when upgrading hardware.
I am working on a few things that could definitely use that new XPages Server.
; )
I mostly agree with your list. Server administration and maintenance is of course already pretty easy. It might also still have XPiNC for users who use Notes (and buy additional Notes CALs).
The licensing model should definitely include the option for ISV’s to use the XPage Application Server (or XAS in short) as a platform to deliver SaaS based applications (which of course can be shortened as “XaaS”
SSO should be easy to set up as part of this server. Without it… Will be difficult to get into shops as all applications will require yet ANOTHER name and password. Not good.
This sounds like it has a lot of potential. I hope that there will be reduced (very reduced) costs for registered non-profits.
I help out a ex-racing Greyhound placement charity and I would love to re-do their website in XPages, but as I have researched costs, it wasn’t looking good. The licensing, as it stands, makes this impossible. I was fearing that I would need to move to (and learn) LAMP or some other free (or very cheap) technologies to do this.
I still might, but this announcement makes me more hopeful.
Its going to be a difficult sale for customer not already on Domino platform. There are just too many alternative available. If someone is sold on document database capabilities or NoSQL like capabilities of domino they have options of using popular open source NoSQL dbs such as MongoDb , CouchDB
Some of popular alternatives are
- LAMP
- PHP+NoSQL Db
- RoR + NoSQL
- ROR + MySQL
- Java (with Springframework,Spring WebMVC) + NoSQL
- Java (with Springframework,Spring WebMVC) + MySQL
- Java ( with JSF,Springframework and JSF) + NoSQL/MySQL
- Java (with JSF, RichFaces ) + NoSQL/MySQL
- Java (with JSF,Seam) + NoSQL/MySQL
and yes they all provide rapid application development capabilities and security capabilities.
You are right, there are a lot of open source platforms pur there to develop great applications on. As an ISV I come from the other side though. I have a XPages application that I want to sell and am currently restricted to customer running Domino already. I can’t sell a Domino Server along with my app . It would make my product too expensive. But with a cheap XPages app server I could make the deal since it only adds a few extra bucks to my product. The market will be a lot bigger than it has before the XPages app server.
From the customers perspective, it does not matter what the platform is for the ISV solution. If the pricing for XPages App Server is simple and cheap, than it is a much easier sell to the customer regardless if they are currently using Domino or not. If does not matter as along as the solution can work within their environment. I believe it should only be a Web or Mobile device app server. I see no need to even consider the Notes client in this equation.
Am with Richard here , Just make it so that we can SELL our Xpages Apps not domino.
This could allow organisations to migrate their Domino apps to XPages, as they move their mail to Exchange. A current barrier to moving is the huge investment in workflow applications where Microsoft have no easy equivalent. Will it be a free ‘downgrade’ from Domino ?
If the XPages server had DB2 embedded, we could have a data source that doesn’t have the nsf restrictions.
IBM needs to make money for shareholders, so this offering can’t cannibalize its other products and should fit as a tool within the Vulcan solutions/direction. A scalable server with unlimited CALs may not be good for the bottom line ?
Assume it will run on Linux so we can have a reliable platform.
I think the licensing thing is the crux of the argument. The cost of CALs for external users of the application seems to be the potential problem here, assuming that XPages can compete with Sagar’s list on the technical front.
I’d like to see unlimited CALs for external users if you pay for a CAL for all of your internal users. IBM have to make their money somewhere. That would encourage people to build apps to serve their clients without considering cheaper alternatives on the basis of per user cost. The problem here – this is a good proposition if you are using Notes for mail, maybe not so if you’re not.
However, if XPages doesn’t compete on the technical front with Sagar’s list, IBM risk inviting their existing Notes clients to decouple their apps from Domino, only to see them take the opportunity to switch to LAMP or something similar for a cost saving, and abandon the platform altogether because they don’t have any apps to make it worthwhile. I hope that’s not the case.
Thanks for starting the discussion.
See my comments on my blog : http://planetlotus.org/8a1f70
Sean