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.

Lotusphere 2009: MyWidgets / LiveText / search provider demo


While MyWidgets and LiveText isn’t a part of my session at Lotusphere it still makes a lot of sense in this demo. It shows how Notes 8 provides alternative ways of performing the same task – searching for a package by its track and trace number is this case. One option is using LiveText and another is using a custom search provider. The astute reader will immediately see that this is an extension of the IBM whois plug-in I posted about the other day.

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

TwitNotes – 1.0.6 released to the update site

I just released TwitNotes 1.0.6 to the update site and if you’re using TwitNotes you should upgrade. The reason for the update isn’t functionality but because twitter.com changed the way the API method for verifying credentials works. For more info see the comments to my post from last night (TwitNotes stopped working today 🙁).

To upgrade simply follow the installation guidelines on the TwitNotes page.

TwitNotes stopped working today :-(

Don’t know if twitter.com changed the API or the service is just unreliable but today the service stopped working for me using TwitNotes. I get a “CWPST0071E: The maximum number of login attempts has been exceeded.” and some funny stacktraces in the log of the Notes client. I also see a “java.net.UnknownHostException: twitter.com” message. Using the website works fine though using the same username/password combination.

I will look into it.

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.