Update Site for Sametime – why not simply go local?

As pointed to by Adam Gartenberg there’s a new article out on developerWorks (Creating an update site for your IBM Lotus Sametime Connect plug-ins) on how to create an Update Site for your Sametime client deployment. As much as I would recommend the article I really would suggest that readers don’t stop there and read the entire story on Update Sites at Eclipse.org (How to keep up to date) before venturing into this territory.

Although the developerWorks article does a nice job of describing the subject for the Sametime inclined I would recommend also reading about the Eclipse foundations…

As an aside I also wants to mention that you can test plugins using an Update Site without having a HTTP server ready (although we all have a Domino server ready, no?). You can do this because the Eclipse framework also allows for local Update Sites (i.e. on the same computer or on a network share). To use this feature simply choose “Local Site” instead of “Remote Site” and point your Sametime client to the Update Site directory under your Eclipse workspace. Very nice for testing.

Lotusphere 2007: Finishing the presentation


Apart from reloading my laptop I’m spending a lot of time finishing of my Lotusphere 2007 presentation. It is hard to imagine that there are only 19 days until I leave for Orlando. Only the weather makes it easier to grasp as it is trying its best to be Orlando-like. We haven’t seen a snow flake yet and it’s 8-10 degrees celcius (50F) outside.

My presentation is done, but I’m still fiddling with the minute details of screenshots, which demos to include etc. I’m finding it a little hard to decide on the technical level for the presentation. How much can I assume the attendees know and how much do I have to explain? The crowd at Lotusphere 2006 seemed quite mixed – lot of hard core folks and some that only just knew their way around the Designer IDE. I’m leaning towards simply focusing on the subject at hand and assume that the attendees know the surrounding stuff.

It’s hard…

Any pointers from the more hard core presenters?

Happy New Year

I’m sitting here reloading my laptop on the last day of the year (T minus 12,5 hours). I guess that’s kind of geeky but the holidays around Christmas are normally the only days in the year where I can allow my laptop to be out of order so that’s what I’m doing. Geeky or not… 😉 Reformatting the drives and reinstalling Windows plus service packs are the steps that takes longest. The rest is more a matter of remembering all the little details. Notes was of cause back up in a matter of minutes. Reinstall the old version, replace the data directory and the notes.ini and I was laughing. Took around 3 minutes total. Nice!

Happy New Year!

Composite thinking

In the issue of the Lotus developerWorks newsletter that I received in my inbox today there is a link to an article on creating applications using the Property Broker of Lotus Expeditor (Creating collaborative components for IBM Lotus Expeditor Property Broker). This was kind of funny since it coincided with me receiving a Java newsletter with an article on using the PropertyChangeListener of the Java SDK.

For those not in the know, the Property Broker is the middleware which is used in the Lotus Expeditor framework to dispatch property change events between components and hence is the glue that makes the different components of a composite application work together. The Property Broker is configured either declaratively using an UI or using an API.

The approaches described in the two articles are quite similar and both describe how using a declarative approach (much like extension points in Sametime 7.5 development) allows for a much more flexible solutions that are less brittle and prone to breaking caused by API changes. An added benefit is the absence of compile time checks which means that you may develop and deploy components that doesn’t need to know of any other components that acts on the property changes it fire. The alternative to declarative events is the use of the Observer design pattern and Listener-interfaces en masse e.g. like in Swing.

Reading the articles has really got me thinking about how to leverage these capabilities in new and existing applications. I see great possibilities and the possibility of having many applications work together to form a greater whole.

I think the advent of composite applications will mean that the job of the application architect will become more challenging and you need to change the point of view from which applications are designed and developed. Applications will move from being monolithic entities to being composite and hence you need to decide on which properties to expose and how to work with “client” applications. This you need to decide on at design time. Applications should be designed and built as smaller interconnected components and not as the CD-ROM AutoInstall, 7-databases-in-one, applications of today.

Sounds intriguing but challenging…

All these possibilities are exciting and it will be interesting to see how many of the Lotus Expeditor capabilities will be exposed by the Notes 8 client and how many Notes 8 customers will pick up on it.

Becoming a NOMAD

I received my new 4GB USB key today and have already loaded Notes 7.0.2 on it using Chris’ excellent howto (Lotus Notes 7.0.2 – NOMAD Review). There wasn’t much to it and I didn’t even have to manually add admin.exe and designer.exe since I used a full Notes install image. Very nice… 🙂

The USB key comes loaded with the U3 software so now I need to find an IPSEC VPN client that is U3 compatible or one that can be installed on an USB key to be on Cloud Nine. The client should work with Cisco appliances.

Looking forward to lighter roaming.

J9 Launching plug-in for Sametime 7.5 development

Since I get some questions on how to find this plugin I thought I would post the URL. The plugin can be downloaded here (link to full URL at dev.eclipse.org) or you can get it via this http://tinyurl.com/w97so as long as it works… This is even more relevant where the link posted in the Integration Guide of the Sametime 7.5 Java SDK doesn’t work anymore.

What brilliant person decided to publish a document with link pointing directly into CVS with specifying the revision? I would say that a short redirection link via ibm.com would make much more sense!