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.

Two interesting pieces of Eclipse news

  • Microsoft forges first official link to Eclipse
    “Microsoft Corp. today announced its first collaboration with the open source Eclipse Foundation by committing provide engineering support to allow the Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) use Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). The move aims to make it easier for Java developers to write applications that look and feel like native Windows Vista, according to Microsoft.”
  • BlackBerry embraces Eclipse
    “Research In Motion (RIM) has joined the Eclipse Foundation and released a BlackBerry plug-in for Eclipse that provides the ability to develop and debug BlackBerry applications without leaving the familiar Eclipse environment.”

Announcing TwitNotes – a Twitter plug-in for Notes 8

The below screenshot should speak for itself but in case it doesn’t let me explain… Last night and tonight I have been writing a Twitter plug-in for the Notes 8 Standard sidebar. I got tired of using BeTwittered and really wanted a real Notes 8 sidebar plug-in as I have some other ideas I want to incorporate. Once I finalize the plug-in tomorrow and get it on an update site you can install it if you’re interested.

Initial features:

  • Pure SWT application
  • Integration with the Accounts API
  • Preferences via Notes 8 Preference pages (auto refresh (yes/no), refresh interval, number of posts to show, refresh after posting).
  • Shows the Twitter profile image of the poster.
  • Posts to Twitter.

SWT @ Notes 8: Here we go again

As mentioned before Lotusphere 2008 I’m contemplating a series of posts on tips and tricks on developing Eclipse/SWT components for Notes 8. I has been a little quiet on this front since Lotusphere since it takes a little more time than I have been having lately to write these posts. Now with Easter on the horizon I’m planning to get a number of posts out there. I’m working on a number of posts on the subject and currently planning to address:

  • Logging
  • Debugging
  • Why OSGi is important
  • Preferences
  • Actions and ViewParts
  • OSGi services vs. Eclipse extensions

If you have other suggestions please let me know by commenting to this post.

Article: Designing composite applications: Writing an Eclipse component for IBM Lotus Notes

“This article introduces some helper classes so you can quickly build and deploy feature-rich, reusable, Eclipse-based components for IBM Lotus Notes. You also learn how to create a foundation upon which other components can be created quickly and easily.”

Designing composite applications: Writing an Eclipse component for IBM Lotus Notes by Craig Wolpert and Jo Grant from IBM @ IBM developerWorks.

Preemptive support from Atlassian

As you can see from the comments to my post on Watching wikis, the support team from Atlassian found my blog post on the problems I was having with the RSS feeds for the IBM Composite Application wiki. How cool is that the support team goes looking from issues to solve?

Does anyone know how to get in contact with the guys at IBM who run the wikis so the issue can be resolved? As you can see Atlassian already created the support ticket to get you guys going.

Watch wikis

Bob Balfe just blogged about how you can access the underlying data model for Composite Applications and how he wrote up a page on the Composite Application wiki. This is great but did you know that you can subscribe to the wikis and be notified when new content is added? Also without Bob blogging about it. One option is RSS and another is by e-mail. While I prefer RSS the wikis doesn’t allow that since the wiki (Atlassian Confluence) throws an exception due to a missing class.

caused by: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError:
com/sun/syndication/io/WireFeedOutput
 at com.atlassian.xwork.results.RssResult.doExecute(RssResult.java:41)

My guess is that the wiki is run on an IBM JVM and hence doesn’t have the referenced com.sun class. Any way it’s really bad form relying on classes in the com.sun namespace as they are not part of the official API so shame on Atlassian in this case.

Any ways for now e-mail notification is the way to go.

Contributing to a developerWorks wiki

Today I entered the IBM wiki world by contributing to the Composite Application wiki over at developerWorks. It all started with me having to figure out how to add menu items to the menu of a sideshelf component. I found the answer in the wiki (for those interested it’s quite easy using the org.eclipse.ui.viewActions extension point). What I didn’t find was an example of how to programmatically add actions which I also needed so once I figured it out I added the information to the wiki. Programmatically adding actions is useful if you don’t know which actions to add at compile and/or deployment time.

So if you go to the page on creating sideshelf components you’ll find a section on programmatically adding actions.

I really like the idea of the wikis and I really feel good after having contributed. Get some, give some.

P.S.: I know I’m still way behind blogging on my holiday compared to Ed Brill… 🙂