Author: lekkim

Positive, competent, out-spoken, frank and customer focused architect and developer with a strong foundation in web, cloud and product development. I'm a strong advocate for API first and cloud based solutions and development. I have a knack for being able to communicate and present technically complicated matters in conference, customer and training settings. I've previously acted as team member and leader in a product organisation.

Developing plug-ins for Domino Designer in Eclipse (DDE)

With Notes 8.5 just around the corner we also have Domino Designer for Eclipse (DDE) just around the corner. Domino Designer being built on Eclipse opens up the door for plug-in developers and tool vendors to provide tools that plug-in into Designer just like (sidebar) plug-ins plug into the Notes client. The API’s are the same so the stuff you already know can be reused.

Please note: The below requires that you’re running a Notes 8.5 beta with DDE and that your Eclipse IDE is configured for Notes 8.5. See this post for instructions on configuring Eclipse for Notes 8.5.

Developing plug-ins for DDE is however a little tricky as the Expeditor Toolkit or my own instructions will launch the Notes client and not DDE. Unfortunately you can’t just launch DDE once Notes is launched from Eclipse since this will result in a Notes initialization error as Notes is already running and DDE is launched anew. That aside it would also be unnecessarily time consuming for day-to-day development.

The solution is to edit your existing Eclipse launch configuration (or create a new) that launches DDE instead of Notes. So how do you do it? Read on…

First bring up your Notes launch configuration. Now change the “Run a product” dropdown to “com.ibm.designer.domino.product.dde” and then switch to the “Arguments”-tab and change the “Program arguments” field from

-personality com.ibm.rcp.platform.personality
-product com.ibm.notes.branding.notes
-debug
-console
-nl en_US

to

-personality com.ibm.designer.domino.personality
-product com.ibm.designer.domino.product.dde
-debug
-console
-nl en_US

Apply the settings and run the configuration and notice how DDE now launches instead of Notes. Don’t you just love Eclipse?

Now we just need some published extension points…

Launching DDE from the command line

Notes 8.5 brings Domino Designer in Eclipse (DDE) and this means you might want to launch Designer from the command line which is easy once you know the configuration name.

<Notes directory>frameworkrcprcplauncher.exe -config designer

Of cause you can also add the -console command line option to get the OSGi console.

Lotusphere 2009: Cool demo – if I may say so myself :-)


My Lotusphere session preparation is in full swing and as previously mentioned this includes preparing demos.

The latest one I have done is about drag’n’drop and how you can use it to do some cool stuff. The demo shows how you can drag text from an e-mail to a sidebar plug-in and have the sidebar plug-in accept the drop. Then when you drag the text from the sidebar plug-in it is converted into a PDF document hence drag’n’drop from the sidebar plug-in results in a file. Text in – file out.

Using Wink I did a Flash movie that shows the demo.

Think how this could be extended to converting product items to PDF for custom quotations on the fly…

Notes 8 – impossible is nothing


Part of going out and preaching the extensible nature of Notes 8 is having a presentation and demos to back it up. The demos I have but I have been working on the presentation and a graphic for the closing slide. You can see the result so far on the right. It’s clear that I’m not a graphics wizard but I did manage to follow a description on how to create a rubber stamp effect on top of the Notes 8 graphics.

Lotusphere 2009: Demo showing off the extensibility of Notes 8


Part of my preparation for Lotusphere is preparing my session presentation as well as preparing demos for the session. One of the demos is an example of the different extension points available to you as a plug-in developer. As a general rule most of what you see in Notes 8 can be extended.


The demo I did this afternoon is a demo that shows how you might extend the search capability of Lotus Notes by adding your own search provider. In lack of better example I did an search provider that searches the IBM whois service. When the plug-in is loaded you see an additional entry in the search box in the upper right corner of the Notes client. When you submit the search I search the IBM whois service, parse the resulting HTML page and present the results in main search result UI. All in all the demo took me 1,5 hours to do with the HTML parsing being the most difficult part.

Imagine a similar plug-in for your organization to search for license codes, product numbers, DHL tracking codes… The possibilities are endless.

If you’re looking for specific demos you would like to see please let me know…

TOP 10 REASONS to upgrade to Notes 8.5 & Domino 8.5

NOTES

  1. Drag/Drop of Text within rich text editor
  2. Offline support for Activities
  3. Choose from multiple addresses for a person in typeahead
  4. Ability to make your own views look like the PIM views
  5. Forward contact as vCard (along with better import/export)
  6. iNotes improvements (e.g. calendar support in Lite mode)
  7. Roaming user available with new file-based option
  8. Support of ID Vault and Single Logon
  9. Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) and Ubuntu Linux support
  10. Calendar federation

DOMINO

  1. Expanded platform choices
  2. Increased reliability
  3. Dynamic group policies
  4. Improved router scalability
  5. I/O use reduction
  6. Domino Configuration Tuner (DCT)
  7. Domino Designer for Eclipse (DDE)
  8. XPages
  9. ID Vault
  10. Domino Attachment and Object Service (DAOS)

Some general reasons to upgrade to Domino 8.5: You can benefit by upgrading to Domino 8.5 even if the clients are on 8.0.x or earlier. Some of the benefits available:

  • Disk savings of 40% – 60%
  • Server consolidation
  • Application development modernization
  • Improved quality of service