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.

Configure Eclipse 3.4 for Notes 8.5 plug-in development

So ever since I got one of the first drops of Notes 8.5 and with increasing effort since the public beta of Notes 8.5 came out I have been trying to get my Eclipse IDE ready for Notes 8.5 plug-in development no without success. Shout outs to IBM have been unsuccessful… 🙁

Notes 8.5 is built on Expeditor 6.2 which in turn is based on Eclipse 3.4 (codenamed Ganymede). I couldn’t get my Eclipse 3.2/Expeditor 6.1 toolkit combo to work with Notes 8.5 and without an Expeditor toolkit for Expeditor 6.2 I couldn’t get my Eclipse 3.3/3.4 to work.

Finally today I managed to get my Eclipse IDE configured by piecing together different pieces of information found via Google. Below is a description on how to configure the latest build of Eclipse Ganymede (3.4 RC2) for Notes 8.5 plug-in development and debugging. Only caveat I have discovered so far is that I manually have to update the classpath for SWT libraries (e.g. org.eclipse.ui.swt) every time I restart Eclipse.

Once you have gone through the steps in the description (see link below) you should be able to run plug-in projects in Eclipse 3.4 using Notes 8.5.

Good luck!! 🙂

Configure Eclipse 3.4 RC2 for Notes 8.5 public beta

ILUG2008: Sidebar appdev code

Here are the demos I had the time to do at ILUG2008. I didn’t get through all the demos I had planned but that’s life. The zip-file contains a couple of projects you should be able to import into Eclipse.

The included projects are:

  • Basic how to build a sidebar app demo
  • Responding to the workbench – selection listener and ISelection adapting
  • Interacting with Notes data – Notes URLs, resolving URL to document, Notes threading and UI threading
  • OSGi bundle dependency demo

I have a lot more demos ready for Lotusphere! 🙂

Questions? Let me know.

Demo code (ZIP)

Notes 8.5 AppDev woes

I’m trying to get Notes 8.5 to play nice with my Eclipse IDE but without any luck. This means I can’t compile anything for the Notes 8.5 beta client. I started with Eclipse 3.3 since Notes 8.5 is based on Expeditor 6.2 which is based on Eclipse 3.3 but without success as it wont install on that platform. No luck in my Eclipse 3.2 / Expeditor toolkit combo either as I either have the Notes client plug-ins avaiable (e.g. Sametime) or the Eclipse platform (org.eclipse.ui) available. Can’t seem to get both working! 🙁

Will post in the beta forum now…

ILUG2008: Battle of the giants

I’m back at out booth in the exhibitors area after attending Nick Shelness session titled “What are Microsoft’s Plans in the Collaboration Space?”. We met Nick over a pint of Guiness on Tuesday so I had already heard some of the message but it was a really good session with some very interesting contents. The bottom line? He thinks IBM/Lotus is loosing terrain to Microsoft and that Microsoft has now become that trusted partner that IBM used to be. Also he had some nice slides on how the Microsoft portfolio cover the space – I need to get a hold of them…

Besides that it was interesting to see that he appeared a little bit intimidated by the fact that the IBM’ers (especially Ed) was attending. Oh and Ed couldn’t quite resist taking the bait on some of the comments… 🙂

Only point where the crowd did object was when he said that Notes wasn’t built for workflow. That didn’t go down very well with the attendees!

ILUG2008 session

So my session at ILUG2008 has been moved to Friday at 2:30 PM in the big room – don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing. The title was rushed to the organizers due to me being too busy so on the agenda it’s called “Creating power sidebar plugin” which isn’t so great a title. As of now the working title is “Developing sidebar applications for Notes 8 – while staying sane…” and will address a number of topics that I had to figure out the hard way when I started doing sidebar development. I will try to address as many as possible and we’ll see how far I get. Oh – and if you have specific requests let me know before the session.

If I don’t get to cover it all I hope I get to do the session again at Lotusphere… 🙂

See you all in Dublin tomorrow.

TwitNotes – Notes 8.5 beta is not supported

So the public beta of Notes 8.5 is out and I’m sorry to say that it doesn’t play nice with TwitNotes. I have been in contact with IBM Lotus about it (funny that they contacted me) and we’re working on finding out why.

I’ll post more as I find out why but for now it seems to be due to conflicting Java libraries in the TwitNotes plugin and the Notes 8.5 client as such. I thought they were in separate class loaders by it doesn’t appear that way.