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Lotus cancelling the Redbooks?

Rumors are circulating that Lotus/Mike Rhodin plans to pull the plug on the Lotus Redbook center. This can't and must not be true... Be sure to chime in over at the Business Controls Caddy...

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It's been quiet in LotusScript.doc land but...

...I have been hard at work and I'm getting close to a pre-release of LotusScript.doc v.2.

LotusScript.doc v. 2 is being completely rewritten from scratch (in Java), supports multi-threading and handles a wide array of new design elements compared to the 1.0.x code stream. The code and comment parsing is done and I'm currently working some of the more esoteric parsing bugs out.

One of the design goals for version 2 is also adding support for other output formats than the "traditional" framed HTML view. Writing custom output formats will also be possible using a template engine. I'm planning to ship the following documentation formats:

  • XML
  • Traditional framed HTML
  • A more comprehensive HTML report
  • PDF
  • DocBook

The main XML format is almost done and it's what I wanted to show of today and is what I'm showing above. Click the image (or here) for a larger version. The larger XML snippet shows:

  • Ability to see which subforms are used from which forms
  • Ability to see which embedded views are used from which forms/pages and what their singlecategory formula is (if any)
  • Support for buttons (anonymous and named)
  • Support for actions (in action bar and as shared actions)
  • Ability to see which shared actions are used from which action bars
  • Support for subforms
The list of new features is quite a lot longer including vast performance improvements but lets not get carried away. Of cause the XML format will also carry the code comments.

Exporting DXL for databases with Java web services

Today I needed to export a database application containing a web service written in Java as DXL. How stupid of me to think that I could do this with only Notes.jar on my build path... Doing such an export will make your code throw java.lang.ClassNotFoundExceptions unless you have the following libraries on your build path:

  • jvm/lib/ext/notes.jar (not much surprise there)
  • jvm/lib/ext/websvc.jar (due to missing lotus.domino.websvc.client.Service)
  • jvm/lib/ext/mail.jar (due to missing java.mail.Multipart from lotus.domino.ws.ServiceContext)
  • jvm/lib/ext/jsdk.jar (due to missing javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet)
  • jvm/lib/xml.jar (due to missing org.apache.xerces.parsers.SAXParser)
The above was found by diagnosing and reading ClassNotFoundExceptions in Eclipse at runtime since ClassNotFoundException is a runtime exception.

Now back to exporting...