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What's up with the "me too" articles on developerWorks?

After reading the last installment in an article series on Notes 8 development on developerWorks I have to wonder how many articles they (developerWorks) need to publish on creating simple plug-ins, building features and publishing them using an update site. This is already extensively covered as part of the Eclipse development articles both on developerWorks and on eclipse.org/articles.

In my mind a good example of bringing something new to the table is the article on leveraging the current context in Notes 8 (Leveraging user context in the IBM Lotus Notes V8 sidebar and toolbar). That's new. That's something I wanna do. It still uses the first third configuring and setting up stuff but still it's new.

Why not try some more concrete examples that actually cover some of the things that IBM bring to the table in Notes 8 / Sametime 7.5 / Expeditor or some of the areas that is going to cause problems? Suggestions could be:

  • Using the components of Expeditor e.g. the message broker and the web services engine
  • Building Notes UI's using SWT components
  • Making your SWT components look the ones supplied by IBM
  • Communicating with the Notes application from your features/plug-ins
The above suggestions aren't great but I'm dying to read articles on Notes 8/Sametime 7.5 that doesn't spend the better half explaining the same ol' concepts as have been explained so many times before...

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Posted by Mikkel Heisterberg on 06 August 2007 07:14:59 CEST #


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Re: What's up with the "me too" articles on developerWorks?

Comment from Bob Balfe on 06 August 2007 20:49:22 CEST #
You might want to follow a couple of blogs that discuss these very topics. Basically what you are asking for are better Composite Application samples. (maybe not)

My blog: http://blog.balfes.net
CA blog: http://www-03.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/CompApps

I have also written a couple of articles and postings around your points. Arguably, I will not be getting any author awards but they are a start.

Extending the IBM Lotus Notes V8 mail with Eclipse
Creating collaborative components for IBM Lotus Expeditor Property Broker
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Re: What's up with the "me too" articles on developerWorks?

Comment from Mikkel Heisterberg on 06 August 2007 21:11:37 CEST #
I already follow the Composite Application blog and I find it a good read. My main point, and reason for the post, is that many of the concepts and approaches that you describe on the CA blog never reach the frontpage of Lotus developerWorks and hence is "lost" to the majority of the Notes community. This is too bad as they really underscore why Notes 8 is a big leap forward. My idea is to show developers what's possible and they'll figure out the low-level stuff (plug-ins, features) later.
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Re: What's up with the "me too" articles on developerWorks?

Comment from Axel on 14 August 2007 15:42:03 CEST #
Thanks Bob. I second the point of Mikkel. Lotus should focus more on the Expeditor-specific part. I recommend anybody who is doing any a bit deeper Eclipse/RCP/Expeditor development to read one or a few of the excelent books by Clayberg et. al., Mc Affer et. al. and/or Daum (last one is german author). All the stuff mentioned by Mikkel is described there in great detail. Those without money or book-haters may colect the same info from different articles, flash movies, etc. on eclipse.org. So there is clearly no need to duplicate that info again on lotus@developerworks. Heck. Maybe they could even contract an external writer with a longstanding commitment with Lotus Notes, some The View articles and quite a few blog postings about Eclipse (if there is something interesting to publish) :-) Maybe the articles will get more focused when Expeditor and its tooling matures.

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