Who is "Us"?
Well, that would be Andreas Rosen (Qkom.de) and myself Matthias Wille (esemalta.com). Both of us are players in the Lotus Notes/Domino world for many year. We got to know each other during my time as the head developer of Integra for Notes, for which Qkom became a Business Partner in 2003. In the end of 2006 I decided for a new career, but Andreas and I stayed in contact. To an extent that I do project related work for Qkom, despite my new job.
Early in 2008 Andreas sent me an email, which ultimately lead to the idea of FlexDomino.net. It was one of these emails I usually just place in the follow up (later) folder, but by pure chance I decided to follow a link contained in the email with a heading saying something in the lines of "have a look at this, it looks interesting". The link pointed to the Adobe Flex website.
Coincidentally I was looking exactly at this point in time into the development of a new online booking system for ESE Malta, the company I'm working for and for that reason the demo's I saw on the Adobe Flex website struck me literally like a lightning bolt. I immediately downloaded an evaluation copy of Adobe Flex Builder 3 Beta and started developing with one target in mind: connecting a Flex RIA to a Domino back-end.
The story started to become even more serious when Andreas Rosen surprised me with the suggestion to hold a presentation at the DNUG (German Notes User Group) spring conference in Bremen (June 2008). Don't know which devil rid me at this time as I'm certainly far from being a natural speaker; but I said yes, let's do it. So I worked a lot of nights to prepare a presentation and more importantly some demos that would demonstrate the possibilities of combining Adobe Flex and Domino.
Shortly after the decision I also had the idea to reserve the FlexDomino.net domain; at this point just in case more would develope after DNUG. And sure it did! The interest we sparked at DNUG gave us one clear message: to continue. And so we decided to use the domain to build up a community platform for developers of both worlds.
Of course both of us can only kick off the process of building up this community as we both have other professional responsibilities. We therefore invite everyone who is interested in developing RIAs with Adobe Flex accessing Domino back-ends to join us and make this community platform alive.
Matthias Wille, August 2008
Holger Janssen joint us in our quest to evangalise Flex and Domino. He will be focusing on the ILOG components using Domino as back-end as well as other interesting combinations such as Flex and Google Apps. You will soon see some of his works.
Matthias Wille, May 26th 2009