Whole books could be written on the terribleness of Lotus Notes. For those too young to remember the 90s, LN really was as bad as everyone says, turning what should be simple (email, maybe a few custom forms) into swampy morasses of pain.
When intranet webapps came along everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief.
Notes was a double-edged sword. It could be as terrible as you've heard, but on the other had it also let non-programmers build surprisingly useful applications all by themselves. (Which is part of why it stuck around for so long -- being useful, those apps tended to get wedged into critical parts of the business process, which meant you couldn't just pull them out and throw them away.)
Notes was conceived in 1984 and at the time was an amazing platform which featured a secure client/server architecture, RSA encryption, data replication and offline support. Both the Notes client and the server (later renamed to Domino) needed to run on multiple platforms (Win 3.x, OS/2, Netware, NT, Alpha, RISC systems etc), and while the code was native C code on each platform, all UI of the client was implemented using an abstraction layer called NEM ("Notes Environment Manager"). Likewise, all database storage was abstracted in NSF ("Note Storage Facility"; and Notes databases to this day still have the .nsf extension). Long story short, the NEM layer was a trade-off between portability and consistency across platforms. And, Notes used F9 to refresh data, way before the Windows standard of F5 was a standard...
> When intranet webapps came along everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief.
Not entirely. Sometimes they were replaced by applets, which are just native application wrapped in a thin layer of html. This causes its own set of problems. At one place I worked (a large government agency), a critical spreadsheet ran as an applet which was only compatible with IE9. They couldn't upgrade anyone's PC's because they risked an auto-update of IE, which would break the ability to run that app.
At another job, a certain time tracking application ran as an applet, requiring a specific version of the jvm to be installed.
Deploying an application that runs in the browser using the browser's native capabilties - js, html, css works great. Using it to embed an applet doubles the misery, as in the short term management thinks they've purchased a portable, always-compatible "web-app", while what they've done is bought a native binary they can no longer properly provision their workstations to run.
> When intranet webapps came along everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief
Not so fast. As a web developer we still had to contend with the horror of IE5/6/7 for a few more years, and initially WITHOUT anything resembling the utility of something like JQuery!
I remember being happy when IE7 came out, because it fixed a bunch of CSS bugs in IE6, and also finally supporting PNG transparency meant that whole new kinds of design were actually possible ... feels so weird knowing what we can do today with CSS and be reasonably sure it works in three major browsers.
I was building "IE-only" internal web apps at the time (with increasing disgust) and having to support legacy browsers even if you knew they were just IE was hell. When I finally broke out into open-source and STILL had to support IE BUT ALSO firefox, safari and chrome (did chrome even exist yet? Mozilla maybe?)... it was not a happy time
When intranet webapps came along everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief.