Almost a workspace
As many of you know, I have been playing with various small Linux based laptops which are going to change the world. One thing I have noticed on some of them is a familiar user interface. This is the Elonex One, it was launched last week in the UK and I was there to play with it, I even did a review. Here is the home screen of the One in tablet mode:
Now lets look at another small Linux laptop, this is the Asus EeePC which in the UK RM are calling the RM Minibook:
Does that remind you of anything? Let me give you a clue 
I couldn’t get Notes standard for Linux running on it (mainly because of the odd way IBM packaged the install I think) but this is Notes 8 basic for Windows running under Wine.
Of course no article about world changing Linux laptops would be complete without a picture of the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop so here it is:
No workspace on that one, but it is running CouchDB (yes, that URL does start with localhost)
March 10th, 2008 at 1:29 am
So what is this CouchDB, is it better than Lotus Notes/Domino? If it is, I will use it. At least IBM seems to like it since they bought it, including Damien Katz.
March 10th, 2008 at 10:34 am
No, CouchDB is not better than Notes/Domino. It is however the first thing I have seen which will be better than Notes/Domino. Remember all that fuss when Steve Mills talked about taking Notes into the workshop and starting again? Well thats kind of what CouchDB is. It stores documents as JSON so datatypes are all variable length and like Domino arrays are no problem in fields. The data is stored in documents and not tables, so it is non-relational like Domino. It has indexed views like Domino, it has a full text search engine too. The back end is written in Erlang which is very good at concurrency so it should scale very nicely to lots of processors or clusters of servers. It should also be very reliable because Erlang has features to restart child processes. It does replication too. Old versions of documents are stored (they can be purged after a while) so it can do some wiki like history of changes. Replication conflicts get stored in the stack of old versions so they don’t get in the way like they can do in Notes (in a way everything is assumed to have old versions and replication conflicts all the time so applications are never “surprised” by a conflict.). At the moment CouchDB is a really good back end which is still under development. It has a bit of an admin front end including a notespeek like browser. It has no IDE and no client as such but there are libraries for using it from all sorts of web applications. There is also the beginnings of an API for Lotuscript which I wrote.