How Eclipse improvements are important to Lotus Notes 8

Eclipse 3.6 (also called Helios) was just released the other day and with a new release of Eclipse comes a new release of SWT (the underlying widget framework). Among the many release notes you’ll find “Eclipse 3.6 SWT News and Noteworthy” outlining core SWT improvements.

Especially one of the improvements was of interest as I see how it could be used to improve Lotus Notes, the interaction with the OS and in turn the usability of the client. The feature is about the program representation in the program list normally shown in the bottom of the screen. Below are some samples. I could see this used to give feedback about unread e-mails, pending IM’s, progress of overall replication etc. Interesting stuff (see “TaskItem overlay image / text / menu / process” in the release notes).

5 thoughts on “How Eclipse improvements are important to Lotus Notes 8”

  3. I hate the fact that I’m still stuck in 3.4 for doing Expeditor dev (am I? If I’m mistaken please DO tell…)  I wonder when the changes will flow into Expeditor/Notes? What’s the timeframe? How will it affect existing plugins?

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  4. Well I do it otherwise. I use the latest Eclipse IDE (currently 3.5 as I haven’t moved to 3.6 yet) but manually configure it for Notes as a target platform using my own guidelines. For more info see here –> https://lekkimworld.com/pages/eclipse34_notes851.html

    As to the timeline it actually depends on the timeline of Lotus Expeditor (or XPD) as well. I don’t know the timeline of XPD but I think it will be moving along but it probably wont move to Eclipse 3.6 for a while (we’re currently at XPD 6.2.2 so it will probably be XPD 6.3 before we see Eclipse 3.6 included). IBM did however include some Eclipse 3.4 bundles when the rest was at 3.3 so you’ll never know… 🙂

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  5. Will try it with 3.6, I get errors trying to install the Expeditor toolkit in 3.6 and just give up, but I’d like to use one IDE for all my Java work so when things calm down I’d like to reinvestigate.

    Say, is there a way to share NotesSessions among threads or am I correct in assuming its impossible?

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