Look for collaboration features if you work in a team. Opt for a suite if you don't already have a development infrastructure. Lotus Notes began as collaborative groupware and was neither a client-server application nor a Web site tool. To help developers build these expanded Notes applications, Lotus delivered Domino Designer. So a key factor in determining the appropriate Web application development tool is how easily it lets you access information stored in a database.
Native drivers are the better of the two.
But ODBC has the advantage of being generic, so the application won't notice if the back- end changes. Another database capability to look for is a tool's support for the Structured Query Language. SQL is the lingua franca of database programming. In Web applications you want to be able to embed SQL statements, passing through to the database for processing, by either coding directly or using a wizard. The other way to run SQL is to call stored procedures, which are precompiled SQL functions stored on and executed by the database.