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Lotusphere 2009: AD215 - Practical DXL Magic

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:56:50 GMT

Just sat through Stephan Wissels session on DXL and it was great. Good slides, not too many of them, excellent demos and altogether a great session. Way to go!

Below are the cliff notes.

IResource in DDE returns DXL
DXL Studio by Stephan Wissel
DXL Explorer
Setting setForceNoteFormat="true" makes export round trip safe but not usable for anything else than round tripping (== binary)
stream out has to be UTF-8
Switch of "Compile LotusScript" to avoid script related import options; you can always recompile later
Watch out for line break issues; improvements needed; work from DOM tree in memory
If export fails try exporting design elements one by one; issue is probably a race condition as an 88 millisecond wait between design elements makes it work
Get a decent XSLT/XPath editor - NO Notepad/vi
Approx. 156k lines of LotusScript in all IBM templates - thought it would be more (based on 69 templates
Cocomo tool for estimating how much time it takes to redo code
Cool demo showing how to transform a view to a XPage, some copy/pasting required but it works like a charm
Even cooler demo transforming a view to a XPage, again copy/pasting required but worked perfectly

I'm trying to create script libraries using DXL - possible?

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 14:02:51 GMT

I have spent a little time this weekend trying to create Java script libraries (that is script libraries with Java code and not "JavaScript" libraries) from scratch using DXL. Exporting the DXL of a script library with a jar-file imported into it yields some base64 in a <javaarchive /> tag. The base64 data is however not decodable as it's not valid base64. Base on prior experiences with this kind of stuff I tried decoding the bytes but without success.

The header in base64 is (or at leas to a multiple of 4 characters) is "UEsDBBQACAAIAKyEATkAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUAAAA". I guess the beginning is probably a CDFILEHEADER struct (based on prior help) but I'm unable to decode it... :-(

The struct should start with a DSIG struct (16 bit unsigned integer and a 32 bit unsigned integer) but I'm unable to get anything that makes sense. I end up with 20555 for the first WORD but that doesn't "compute". Bummer!

If you've done any work on this and is willing to share please drop me a comment. Thanks.

Exporting DXL for databases with Java web services

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 15:56:00 GMT

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...

Building XPath expression from XML node

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 06:27:36 GMT

Ever do parsing of large XML/DXL documents? Does the parsing ever fail? If it does you know you need some way to log the offending element in a compact and standardized way. For situations like this (and numerous others) XPath is the way to go and with code like I'll show in this post you are good to go. Java code ahead!

Lotusphere 2007: The power of DXL (AD503)

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 17:02:04 GMT

Apart from being told that the DXL implementation in Notes/Domino 8 will be able to surface the source code and WSDL from web services the session was below my expectations.

The fact that the source code of web services will be surfaced will make LotusScript.doc able to pick it up which is nice since I've had problems with this in the past (Domino 7 web services woes). I talked to the developers about this last year and it appears I've been heard. Thank you for that!

Mark Ambler: Using LotusScript to import an image resource

Sun, 20 Aug 2006 12:17:31 GMT

I just saw that Mark Ambler wrote some code to import an image resource into a Notes database using DXL. It complements the code I wrote some time back to export an image resource from a database using DXL (Helping out a fellow blogger getting the actual bytes of an image resource - a lesson in the intricacies of DXL representation).

See the post for the complete code: Using LotusScript to import an image resource