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The last time El Reg covered IBM Domino we used a chisel

Upstart Sapho gives Notes' heir the 'kids want all software to be a Facebook clone' treatment

The last time The Register covered IBM Domino, we rode to work on a brontosaurus and wrote the story with a a chisel.

Imagine our surprise, then, to learn that an upstart named Sapho still thinks it can turn a quid with product for the venerable Lotus-Notes-derived messaging-and-apps platform.

Sapho's an integration play that peers inside enterprise applications and plucks out events or information that workers need to see in their workflows and/or to-do lists. The company assumes that modern workers dislike using enterprise software and/or can't be bothered to CTRL-TAB between different SaaS applications, so lets users consume the resulting stream of notifications in either a Facebook-like feed or in their preferred messaging app.

The company calls the way to cook up those event-detector-and-worfklow-insertion tools “micro apps” and offers an editor to create them, complete with hooks into popular enterprise apps.

And now also into IBM Domino, which hasn't been hot since last millennium but does what lots of legacy software does: stubbornly refuse to be replaced because some of the apps built on it are useful and/or too painful to replace. Sap[ho s therefore using Java Native Interfaces to extract and re-publish Domino data.

Scraping data out of legacy applications in the name of easier access is an old trick.In the mid-to-late 1990s 3270 emulators ran hot for a while, before SOAP and then enterprise service buses came along to take over the task. These days any competent software package has a RESTful API to make piping data in and out a dream. Even Domino, thanks to Domino Access Services.

Which means you, too, could decide to pipe out Domino data and pretty it up some, if Sapho doesn't get you feeling Sapphic. ®

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