Tag: eclipse

Sametime 7.5 / Expeditor again mentioned in Eclipse Magazine

Sametime 7.5 and Lotus Expeditor are mentioned (again) in the February issue of Eclipse Magazine. Although it requires registration the magazine is free to download and read. A brief except from the introduction has been reproduced below:

"The first innovative and major instant messaging collaborative client was built on the Eclipse framework. By leveraging Eclipse, IBM Lotus Sametime users could access new plug-in capabilities such as audio/video extensions, location-oriented or mapping applications. and corporate calendar integration."

The article goes on to talk about Sametime and Expeditor although they call it by the former name of Websphere Everyplace Deployment. From a Notes-community perspective the interesting thing is that they show how easy it is to develop plug-ins for the platform and hence invite new ISV’s to contribute plug-ins.

The gauntlet has been thrown – Notes developers read up on Java and get going in Eclipse development to stay ahead… 🙂

Sign the petition for Domino Designer on Eclipse!!

Read all about it on Stephans blog… Direct linkt to the petetion: http://www.lotususers.org/dde

Hmmmm… Would it be considered bad form to post the code for an agent that read through your Domino Directory and did an HTTP POST request for each of the users there? 😉 I mean – doesn’t all users want applications written using best-of-breed tools?

Should I? Well using HTTPClient it wouldn’t take long… Let’s go… No I better not! Well just maybe… Arrggghhh!! 😉 

POST /DDE/petition?CreateDocument HTTP/1.1
Host: http://www.lotususers.org
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0
Content-Length: 36
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

name=John+Doe&email=jdoe@example.com

P.S.: I know the above wont work – there is a trick!! You didn’t really think I would post the correct code did you? 😀

Lotusphere 2007: Run your Update Sites from Domino (ID211)


Just attended ID211 by Thomas Gumz from IBM on how you can use Domino as the source for your Update Site to provision features and plug-ins to Sametime 7.5, Expeditor and Notes 8. Lotus has built a really cool template, shipping with Notes 8, that allows you to run an Update Site out of a Notes database instead of using a file system based site. Very cool.

Thomas also mentioned that in Notes 8 you can provision features and plug-ins using NRPC instead of HTTP for remote sites. This will only work against Domino 8 servers since this is a new call that has been added to the NRPC protocol. The URL syntax will be something like nrpc://intranet.company.com/_<replica_id>/updatesite.nsf instead of the http:// equivalent.

Lotusphere 2007: Sametime 7.5 and Notes 8 sidebar compability


After INV107 I talked to Kevin Cavanaugh since I wanted to hear if the the extension point (com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.imhub.miniApps) we currently use for miniApps in Sametime 7.5 will be the same as we should use in Notes 8 sidebar applications.

It turns out that the extension point name will be changed with the Sametime 7.5.1 release. From thereon it will be frozen and the extension point name will be the same for Sametime 7.5.x miniApps and Notes 8 sidebar applications.

A small detail worth noticing…

Show ‘n Tell Thursday: The missing link for plugging Notes into you Sametime 7.5 plugin (10 January 2007)


When you develop and run plugins for Sametime 7.5 on Windows or Linux you do not use a standard Java Development Kit (JDK) and standard 1.4.2 JVM. Instead you use a slightly modified version called the JCL Desktop JDK and the J9 JVM. The “slightly modified” means that some features have been removed from the JDK to make it “safe” for the Expeditor framework that Sametime 7.5 runs on.

An unfortunate side-effect of this decision is that you cannot use the Notes/Domino API (that is notes.jar or ncso.jar) without resorting to additional libraries. The reason is that the ever present lotus.domino.NotesException inherits from org.omg.CORBA.UserException which is an exception class that has been removed in the modified runtime class library (for more information about lotus.domino.NotesException see my post called Java in Notes/Domino Explained: NotesException).

Fortunately there is a way to remedy that. The solution is to include the ibmorbapi.jar library (can be found in c:Program FilesNotes7Datadominojava on my laptop) in your plugin alongside notes.jar or ncso.jar. The ibmorbapi.jar library is quite large (around 400kb) but I haven’t yet played around with it to see if you could simply get away with including the org.omg-packages.

Now you know why your plugin fails to compile due to indirectly referenced Corba classes.

Anyways – someone who has the ears of the Sametime development team might want to mention this to them. Apart from that – great product and its a joy to develop plugins for Sametime 7.5! 🙂

IBM Workplace Designer mentioned in Eclipse Magazine


IBM Workplace Designer is mentioned and used as an example on how to leverage Eclipse as a foundation for rich-client applications. Too bad Expeditor, Sametime or Notes 8 isn’t mentioned…

Eclipse Power in IBM Workplace/Domino
“Eclipse is a robust functional platform that IBM Workplace/Domino developers can put to full use in their current and future projects. In this article, we focus on the benefits of Eclipse as a client foundation that has a cross platform, rich UI widget set that is based on native widgets, a rich UI framework, pre-defined dialog basis: Wizards, Preferences, Properties, and other UI: Perspectives, Views, Editors, Workbench (as a base), ActiveX support in SWT on Win32 (platform integration), and a good Help system. Eclipse as a client foundation is an extensible platform that features a plug-in extensibility model, shared programming model with tools development, education that is already developed for tools offerings, core services, extension points, core frameworks, production quality platform with two major releases in the market, and an Open Source code base. “

Eclipse Magazine, Issue 5, December 2006.

DB2 Development Workbench

While looking to DB2 v. 9 I stumbled upon DB2 Developer Workbench which is the follow-up to the old suite of Swing based Java DB2 development applications which I must say was due for an overhaul. If DB2 Developer Workbench is the yardstick for future IBM development products based on the IBM Eclipse/Expeditor platform all I can say is wow!!

I already picture an integrated development platform for Lotus, DB2 and Java products (can’t make myself write Websp…). It’s gonna be a BIG install but imagine the applications you can build that leverage Notes 8 as the client for applications what access Notes, DB2 and Java resources. How’s that for composite applications.

Seems everything is melting together nicely…

Application development with DB2

Need XSLT support in Callisto?

For some reason I fail to understand the recently released collection of plugins from the Eclipse Foundation (also referred to as Callisto) doesn’t include support for XSLT even though it has editors for XML, DTD’s and XML Schema (XSD). Support to XSLT is however very easy to add since you can use the EclipseXSLT plugin.

Installing is as easy as creating a new remote update site under “HelpSoftware UpdatesFind and Install” and installing it from there. The address to the update site is http://eclipsexslt.sourceforge.net/update-site. Took me 5 minutes or so. Easy. It does however require that you already installed the XML part of the Callisto release.