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.

Caveat when converting an Eclipse Java project to a plug-in project

Based on some advise I got in the “Meet the Developers” lab at Lotusphere I converted a Java project to a plug-in project in Eclipse today. This will make it easier to manage my dependencies instead of manually having to export the model classes as a jar and including that. I tried it before but it didn’t work. Today I found out why.

The conversion via right-clicking and choosing “Convert Projects to Plug-in Projects” (in the “PDE Tools” section) went fine but afterwards the classes from the plug-in wasn’t found by my sidebar plug-in in Notes 8. Compilation in Eclipse went fine.

The issues turned out to be caused by Eclipse not automatically adding the compiled classes to the plug-in. To solve this I had to open the manifest (MANIFEST.MF), switch to the “Build” tab and in the “Runtime Information” section add a library named “.” (yes a period) on the top left and the source code folder I wanted to include on the top right.

Once I did that everything went smoothly.

Lotusphere 2008: Kick ass appdev info!

Besides being in the showcase today I went to the “Meet the developers” lab today and spent the better part of 2 hours in there talking to various developers on the Sametime Connect client team and Sametime server team. Special thanks to Jessica Ramirez from the Connect client team for taking the time.

Besides getting some invaluable help with my own sidebar component I got exactly the info I needed on how to send richtext through the Sametime Java API – it’s not straight forward, not documented and not something you figure out on your own. Suffice to say it includes knowing the right hex codes and correct data structures. Jessica actually brought up the actual source code of the Sametime Connect client to show how it’s done!

What’s an important lesson from this that if you need some piece of information go and ask!

Lotusphere 2008: BOF101 – startling news!

I went to BOF101 ((IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 Client Roaming) last night (Tuesday) to hear about the plans for (re)introducing roaming back into Notes 8. The BOF was moderated by Richard Wilson and John Banks. Besides these two Jeff Eisen sat in of the BOF.

The plans discussed were the plans for Notes 8.5 so I guess it’s official not roaming wont be back in Notes 8.0.1 – at least for Notes 8 Standard. Roaming is supported, as it has been previously, in Notes 8 Basic. There are some nice things planned for roaming incl. a complete overhaul of the architecture. For one Lotus is planning on supporting roaming using file servers instead of Domino servers for in-office roaming. This is nice – especially for sales offices. Besides this and other good stuff there was a recognition that roaming needs work and we had a good discussion.

What was a little startling to me was that they hadn’t really thought of roaming plug-ins. For me roaming means that a user can log off one machine, log into another and the eperience will be the same. Well it appears that this will not be the case. Currently the plan is to roam the “basic” Eclipse configuraton files but not the plug-ins directory which means that installed sidebar plug-ins may or may not be available on the workstation you roam to. Additionally plug-in parts of composite applications will need to be redownloaded. As the plan looks now, although Lotus was taking lots of notes (no pun intended), you will have to rely on plug-ins enforced to be installed via update sites for corporate wide mandatory sidebar plug-ins. I guess there’s no “My Widgets” for roaming users as it looks now.

It sounded like Lotus is looking for design partners for roaming so if you feel you have somthing to contribute on the matter now would be a good time to raise your voice.

Decisions are made by those who show up!