Month: February 2009

LS2J rules!

I know it has limitations and that it has issues but today it worked like a charm. I was asked to write a library in LotusScript to resolve groups and nested groups from Active Directory into an array of users. It had to be cross platform which ruled out COM and ActiveX controls even if I had been able to find any.

The solution was of cause to write the code in Java using JNDI (Java Naming and Directory Interface) and then write a thin wrapper class in LotusScript using LS2J (LotusScript to Java bridge supplied with Notes out-of-the-box). Now I have a cross-platform solution that has no external dependencies. Beautiful!

So learn Java already! 🙂

IBM software available in the Amazon Cloud

Today I received an e-mail from Amazon Web Services (AWS) stating that IBM and Amazon has partnered up to provide IBM (and Lotus) software in the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). How cool is that!?

We are excited to announce that IBM and Amazon Web Services have teamed up to provide you with the ability to build and run a range of IBM applications using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) service. This relationship will enable you to bring your own IBM licenses to Amazon EC2, utilize IBM’s “Development” AMIs, or leverage the “Production” Amazon EC2 running IBM service. The initial list of IBM environments that will be available includes: IBM DB2, IBM Informix, WebSphere sMash, IBM Lotus Web Content Management, and IBM WebSphere Portal Server.

More info on the AWS partner page.

Tip for improving Notes startup time from Eclipse

On Tuesday I was contacted by a fellow Yellow-head concerning my Lotusphere 2009 demos and the startup time of Notes from Eclipse. The demos had nothing to do with it – the issue was with his Eclipse setup and was easy to fix.

He was experiencing that it took minutes to launch Notes from Eclipse which made development very frustrating and time consuming. He was using Eclipse configured through Lotus Expeditor Toolkit which made me take special notice as this could be a general problem and something many may/will experience.

After discussing his setup for a while I thought a little about it to tried and think of what could slow down Notes startup. One of the first things I could think of was that he might (inadvertently) be clearing his Eclipse workspace very time he launched Notes. This operation is time consuming and it turned out to be the case. After correcting this he was down to launch times in order of seconds which is also what I experience.

The Eclipse workspace contains all your Eclipse settings as well as a persistent registry of the plug-ins installed on the platform as well as their dependencies. This dependency graph takes a while to put together as it requires reading through all the plug-in manifests and trying to resolve the dependencies specified there. So as you can imagine clearing the workspace before each launch of Notes will take unnecessarily long. If no plug-ins are added to the core platform it doesn’t make any sense to recalculate this dependency graph.

To make sure you don’t clear your workspace when launching Notes from Eclipse do as follows:

  1. Open the launch configuration settings (select “RunRun Configurations…” from the menus)
  2. Select your Notes launch configuration (probably named “Notes” or similar)
  3. On the “Main”-tab take a look at the “Workspace Data”-section at the top. Make sure there isn’t a checkmark in the “Clear” ckecbox. If there is, remove it and apply the changes.

That’s all there is to it.

Quick survey: What would it take to get you started with Java in Notes?

Update: Let’s focus on Java development for Notes – not necessarily plug-ins but simply what would it take to get started with Java – the programming language as that is the first obstacle.

I’m running across quite a lot of people who would like to do sidebar plug-ins and general plug-in development for the Notes 8 platform but who are lacking the Java skills required. Many times they haven’t actually taken the time to learn Java at all since the IDE support in Domino Designer is so poor. Based on this I started thinking about how to get Notes developers started developing in Java. So…

What would it take for you to get started with Java in Notes?

  1. Up-to-date editor in Domino Designer – I wont use anything else!
  2. If it is made easy to develop, test and debug in Eclipse I can live with manually having to move the code to Notes for production use.
  3. It’s not the tool support which is the problem – it’s the lack of time, documentation, API’s, management support or this other thing (please state reason)
  4. I’m not at all interested in Java – I want to develop plug-ins using a scripting language.
  5. Other (please state reason)

Please post your response as a comment and a little explanation if you chose “Other”. If you chose option 2 I might just have a solution for you… 🙂

Thanks.

SWT visual designer


Up to now I have been doing all my Notes 8.5 sidebar UI development manually and coding the UI by hand which is and has been fine. Now getting a WYSIWYG editor is becoming increasingly important both for quick development, demos and for education situations. I went searching for one and found SWT Designer from Instantiations. The editor looks very, very nice (take a look at the demos) and being priced at 239 USD also very competitive from a price standpoint.

My search continues for alternatives but this looks very attractive.