I've talked a bit so far about how Darwino related to Domino from a development perspective, but I think it'd also be useful to delve into specifically which concerns the two platforms address, to see where they overlap and where they don't.

There are two main categories to cover, since Darwino inherits Domino's unusual trait of pouring over from "database" to "app-dev platform".

Database

As I covered a few posts ago, the two are similar at a conceptual level, both being replicating document databases with document-level access control. Aside from the difference between an NSF note's format and a JSON document, the main distinction is that Darwino doesn't cover the actual physical storage of data. Instead, it is based on top of existing SQL servers of various stripes (PostgreSQL and SQLite being the most common). A Darwino application creates a series of tables and uses them as the backing store for the conceptual document database.

This has a number of implications. The main one is that there isn't a "Darwino server" as such - instead, there are SQL databases and Darwino applications acting in tandem. In developing an application, this isn't generally a concern: the Darwino APIs are the same across each database, in the same sort of way that a Domino application doesn't care about the ODS version. However, being backed by a SQL server has some distinct advantages: the server can be administered and optimized using the same knowledge you would use for a "normal" SQL-backed app, and the ability of modern DBs to index JSON data opens up a world of possibilities (think NSFDB2, except good).

The flip side of this bleeds into the second category, as it means that a Darwino application consists of at least two parts: the SQL database and the application, which veers from Domino's "everything in one package" promise slightly.

Application

Things diverge most significantly (though at least as promisingly) when it comes to the application level. Domino has a few "official" ways to develop applications (Notes, legacy web, and XPages) and then hooks to sort of act like a Java EE server, albeit with some notable limitations. Darwino, on the other hand, exists as a sort of "glue layer" in between the database and the application: lower-level than XPages but higher-level than just a database driver.

Darwino provides a common platform for writing Java-based applications, with various services for managed beans, user directories, and so forth, written to work consistently across all of the platforms it targets. Again, this starts out similar to Domino, but diverges in the areas where Darwino takes advantage of other technologies.

At the low level, since Darwino's main requirement is "a Java runtime", it is able to run smoothly on various Java EE servers, on Android, on iOS, and on pretty much anything that provides a capable-enough Java environment (such as, say, Domino). It also, incidentally, means that it works great on Java 8.

At the high level, Darwino doesn't prescribe a specific UI framework, so the field is open to use any of the tremendous array of rapidly-developing Java frameworks on the web side and, as desired, native UI toolkits on mobile. There's a bit of an inherent bias towards REST+client JS applications, since then the same code entirely can be used on both web and mobile (as not every Java web tooklit works on the mobile mini web server as it is now), but that's not obligatory.

Overall

So the overall idea is that Darwino doesn't solve every problem that Domino does, but the problems it chooses to farm out are in the areas where that brings tremendous benefit. In each area where Darwino uses third-party support, it benefits from the tremendous advancements made in recent years, without requiring jumping through weird hoops to get modern techniques to work.