I have been wondering what the “correct” term for the little menu that each sidebar plugin has so today I got in contact via Mary Beth Raven (via im.bleedyellow.com of cause). She told me that the IBM term for a sidebar plugin is a “sidebar panel” and the menu is called a “panel menu”. So there it is…
TwitNotes is ready for distribution and I have the update site all lined up. Only problem holding me back releasing it is an issue I have with conflicting components from my sidebar plug-in and the Lotus Expeditor platform. My plug-in needs ship with Apache Commons HttpClient v. 3.1 and Apache Commons Lang v. 2.3. For some reason my versions of the components wont deploy to Notes 8 since the components conflict with the versions supplied with Lotus Expeditor. The funny thing is that it works perfectly when launching Notes from the Eclipse IDE.
If anyone has any ideas why this might be so please let me know. Maybe a feature patch? Other ideas?
“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.
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… 🙂
I think it’s a bug in the chat window display since inserting a space after the emoticon once you have written some more text displays the emoticon.
I did a video of the bug but for some reason Youtube wont convert it so please download it here.
Am I the only one where typing (y) in the Sametime chat windows doesn’t result in the yes-emoticon but an underscore instead? We’re seeing this across the office on Notes 8.0.1 Standard.
Update: Now 😀 also turn into an underscore instead of a grin-emoticon and apparently it happens in both ends of the conversation. Restarting the chat doesn’t solve the problem.
I’m at a customer site today where they are running Notes 7.0.2 but would like to experiment with (the new) Notes 8.0.1 Standard client. The upgrade of select users went fine but the embedded Sametime client was unable to connect to the Sametime 7 Limited Use server. After some searching on Google and in the developerWorks forums the problem was easy to solve thanks to posts there and some additional searching. I simply needed to add the client ids of Notes 8 and Notes 8.0.1 Standard to the sametime.ini and restart Sametime.
The steps are as follows:
References:
First off this is quite a geeky post I suppose but bear with me – there’s a nice screenshot at the bottom of the post…
The Eclipse foundation is busy developing Eclipse 3.4 which is what will form the base for Notes 8.5 Standard. At least that’s what I’m hearing since the new Expeditor platform is based on Eclipse 3.4. Why should you care as a Notes developer? Why because each release of Eclipse adds significant performance improvements and many new features are added to the underlying platform. While we cannot know which features has already been ported to the Expeditor platform which is the base for Notes 8(.0.1) Standard it is at its core based on Eclipse 3.2.2.
Lots of features has been added since Eclipse 3.2.2 was released (Eclipse is currently at Eclipse 3.3.2) and many of them could have big impact on you as a developer or a Notes user. Why you say? Because the features of Eclipse will directly affect the platform support available to you if you develop SWT plug-ins or if you just use Notes 8 Standard (and don’t we all). Below is a sample list of improvements in Eclipse 3.3 I compiled from the “New and Noteworthy” documents for Eclipse 3.3M1 to 3.3M7.
As you can see some of them could have big impact on you as a developer or user. Everything from better Windows Vista integration to using Mozilla as the embedded browser to just having a DatePicker control could be the difference that makes it worth it.
I’m not saying it is so but that last one could be why I’m having problems with the Sametime screen capture tool on Vista.
As to Eclipse 3.4 I also just perused the “News and noteworthy” documents for the Eclipe 3.4 milestones (M1, M2, M3, M4, M5) and there is some nice stuff in there as well such as the possibility of setting an alpha value for shell (ie. the underlying SWT control for windows). This could make for some killer UI’s. Below is an example screenshot.
Can’t wait to have a much more mature Eclipse platform as the basis for my Notes client.
I received an e-mail from Dan Sickles with a comment on my post on Eclipse Monkey. It appears that integration of Eclipse Monkey into Notes 8 is being worked on by Matthew Hatem – it might just be a “pocket-project” but still – it’s exciting!
Matt did the demos for Mary Beth Raven at Lotusphere and did the “CSS Inspector plug-in” to style Notes 8 Standard (using notes.css) on the fly. They’re still working on getting the plug-in out there.
Here’s the comment from Dan:
“You may have some details on this from your DP chat, but Eclipse Monkey for R8 and Expeditor in general was being shown in the labs at Lotusphere if you knew to ask. I’ve been pestering IBM about this for years. Matt Hatem showed me a very nicely integrated scripting language IDE implementation, probably done with the DLTK, with examples in Javascript (rhino) and ruby (JRuby). Jython, Groovy and any other JVM scripting language could work too.
With a few lines of code, you can add a sidebar or any other Expeditor/SWT component. All the details including UI/Notes threading are handled for you. This was the basis of a blog comment (I forget where) that in two years, most (okay many) new Notes apps will be not be written in Lotusscript or java. For apps of any complexity, the domain classes would certainly be written in java but the overall application logic and UI “controller” code would be a good candidate for a scripting language.
Ask for a demo. I would like to see this in the product.
-Dan Sickles
Las Vegas, NV”
I have to enable “My Widgets” for the sidebar in the Preferences dialog in order for me to play with them This is done using File/Preferences, go to the “Widgets” category and enabling the “Show Widget Toolbar and the My Widgets Sidebar panel” option as shown below.
