Re: Eclipse Monkey – it really could be coming!

I received an e-mail from Dan Sickles with a comment on my post on Eclipse Monkey. It appears that integration of Eclipse Monkey into Notes 8 is being worked on by Matthew Hatem – it might just be a “pocket-project” but still – it’s exciting!

Matt did the demos for Mary Beth Raven at Lotusphere and did the “CSS Inspector plug-in” to style Notes 8 Standard (using notes.css) on the fly. They’re still working on getting the plug-in out there.

Here’s the comment from Dan:

“You may have some details on this from your DP chat, but Eclipse Monkey for R8 and Expeditor in general was being shown in the labs at Lotusphere if you knew to ask. I’ve been pestering IBM about this for years. Matt Hatem showed me a very nicely integrated scripting language IDE implementation, probably done with the DLTK, with examples in Javascript (rhino) and ruby (JRuby). Jython, Groovy and any other JVM scripting language could work too.

With a few lines of code, you can add a sidebar or any other Expeditor/SWT component. All the details including UI/Notes threading are handled for you. This was the basis of a blog comment (I forget where) that in two years, most (okay many) new Notes apps will be not be written in Lotusscript or java. For apps of any complexity, the domain classes would certainly be written in java but the overall application logic and UI “controller” code would be a good candidate for a scripting language.

Ask for a demo. I would like to see this in the product.

-Dan Sickles
Las Vegas, NV”

5 thoughts on “Re: Eclipse Monkey – it really could be coming!”

  4. That is interesting, I specifically asked about eclipse monkey over in the labs and they didn’t really know what I was talking about, though it was over with the domino designer folks not R8/Expeditor.  Anyway really glad to see that they are looking into it.

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  5. I had asked Philippe Riand if the javascript engine from XPages would be available on the client since it already has the Domino API. He said that  XPages would eventually make it to the client but there were no plans to make the scripting engine available as a general purpose tool. After my usual whining, he said that someone was working on integrating Eclipse Monkey and pointed me to Matt Hatem in the Expeditor area. Matt showed me several examples in javascript (Rhino) and ruby (Jruby). These included a sidebar. I don’t remember if this was the standard Eclipse Monkey (actually it would be the Groovy Monkey fork) or if there was additional tooling. It could have been the standard Monkey tools. Either way the bridge from the scripting language to Expeditor/Domino is via a Monkey DOM (Domain Object Model – isn’t DOM overloaded enough?) which exposes a root object to the scripting language.

    Rhinos ships with Java 6 so IBM doesn’t need to use their proprietary JVM javascript implementation for this. It would make sense to move XPages to Rhino also so they can get to Ecmascript 4 without doing it all themselves (google is helping out on that one). And with Rhino, you get E4X.

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