As mentioned the other day (Lotusphere 2007: Sametime 7.5 and Notes 8 sidebar compability) you’ll have to change how you do miniApps once Sametime 7.5.1 is released. I went and talked to Dave Schlesinger in the Developers Lab today since he’s in charge (or actually wrote) the Sametime client toolkit. It turns out that the com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.miniApp extension point will be kept for backwards compatibility but you should start writing miniApp plug-ins as ViewParts instead. This will also be the case for “miniApps” destined for the side-shelf in Notes 8.
Apart from discussing extension points we also talked about how one should go about discovering the active environment. We had a good talk about this since we as partners or ISV’s will need to be able to discover whether we are running in Sametime, Notes 8 or simply Expeditor. This discovery should be possible without having to link against or include specific libraries since not all libraries (e.g. notes.jar) will be available on all platforms. We kind of agreed that a system property would the simplest way to go.
I also asked him to please document the extension point schemas better… 🙂
