Tag: notes85

Quick survey: What would it take to get you started with Java in Notes?

Update: Let’s focus on Java development for Notes – not necessarily plug-ins but simply what would it take to get started with Java – the programming language as that is the first obstacle.

I’m running across quite a lot of people who would like to do sidebar plug-ins and general plug-in development for the Notes 8 platform but who are lacking the Java skills required. Many times they haven’t actually taken the time to learn Java at all since the IDE support in Domino Designer is so poor. Based on this I started thinking about how to get Notes developers started developing in Java. So…

What would it take for you to get started with Java in Notes?

  1. Up-to-date editor in Domino Designer – I wont use anything else!
  2. If it is made easy to develop, test and debug in Eclipse I can live with manually having to move the code to Notes for production use.
  3. It’s not the tool support which is the problem – it’s the lack of time, documentation, API’s, management support or this other thing (please state reason)
  4. I’m not at all interested in Java – I want to develop plug-ins using a scripting language.
  5. Other (please state reason)

Please post your response as a comment and a little explanation if you chose “Other”. If you chose option 2 I might just have a solution for you… 🙂

Thanks.

SWT visual designer


Up to now I have been doing all my Notes 8.5 sidebar UI development manually and coding the UI by hand which is and has been fine. Now getting a WYSIWYG editor is becoming increasingly important both for quick development, demos and for education situations. I went searching for one and found SWT Designer from Instantiations. The editor looks very, very nice (take a look at the demos) and being priced at 239 USD also very competitive from a price standpoint.

My search continues for alternatives but this looks very attractive.

Upgraded to Notes 8.5 GOLD

With Lotusphere 2009 and my session done I upgraded to Notes 8.5 yesterday from the beta version I have been using so far. Upgrade was uneventful and my Notes client is working fine today and my demos today went just fine. Only issue I have is launching Notes from Eclipse. When upgrading from previous beta versions I just had to update the JVM config, the install_id and the rcp_version in my Eclipse launch configuration but after upgrading to Notes 8.5 GOLD I’m getting strange JAAS errors (Eclipse not being able to locate the NOTES LoginContext configuration). I will have to look into this tomorrow when I’m in the office or simply change my Eclipse configuraion to use the Lotus Expeditor toolkit 6.2 instead of my own configuration.

Developing plug-ins for Domino Designer in Eclipse (DDE)

With Notes 8.5 just around the corner we also have Domino Designer for Eclipse (DDE) just around the corner. Domino Designer being built on Eclipse opens up the door for plug-in developers and tool vendors to provide tools that plug-in into Designer just like (sidebar) plug-ins plug into the Notes client. The API’s are the same so the stuff you already know can be reused.

Please note: The below requires that you’re running a Notes 8.5 beta with DDE and that your Eclipse IDE is configured for Notes 8.5. See this post for instructions on configuring Eclipse for Notes 8.5.

Developing plug-ins for DDE is however a little tricky as the Expeditor Toolkit or my own instructions will launch the Notes client and not DDE. Unfortunately you can’t just launch DDE once Notes is launched from Eclipse since this will result in a Notes initialization error as Notes is already running and DDE is launched anew. That aside it would also be unnecessarily time consuming for day-to-day development.

The solution is to edit your existing Eclipse launch configuration (or create a new) that launches DDE instead of Notes. So how do you do it? Read on…

First bring up your Notes launch configuration. Now change the “Run a product” dropdown to “com.ibm.designer.domino.product.dde” and then switch to the “Arguments”-tab and change the “Program arguments” field from

-personality com.ibm.rcp.platform.personality
-product com.ibm.notes.branding.notes
-debug
-console
-nl en_US

to

-personality com.ibm.designer.domino.personality
-product com.ibm.designer.domino.product.dde
-debug
-console
-nl en_US

Apply the settings and run the configuration and notice how DDE now launches instead of Notes. Don’t you just love Eclipse?

Now we just need some published extension points…

Launching DDE from the command line

Notes 8.5 brings Domino Designer in Eclipse (DDE) and this means you might want to launch Designer from the command line which is easy once you know the configuration name.

<Notes directory>frameworkrcprcplauncher.exe -config designer

Of cause you can also add the -console command line option to get the OSGi console.

TOP 10 REASONS to upgrade to Notes 8.5 & Domino 8.5

NOTES

  1. Drag/Drop of Text within rich text editor
  2. Offline support for Activities
  3. Choose from multiple addresses for a person in typeahead
  4. Ability to make your own views look like the PIM views
  5. Forward contact as vCard (along with better import/export)
  6. iNotes improvements (e.g. calendar support in Lite mode)
  7. Roaming user available with new file-based option
  8. Support of ID Vault and Single Logon
  9. Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) and Ubuntu Linux support
  10. Calendar federation

DOMINO

  1. Expanded platform choices
  2. Increased reliability
  3. Dynamic group policies
  4. Improved router scalability
  5. I/O use reduction
  6. Domino Configuration Tuner (DCT)
  7. Domino Designer for Eclipse (DDE)
  8. XPages
  9. ID Vault
  10. Domino Attachment and Object Service (DAOS)

Some general reasons to upgrade to Domino 8.5: You can benefit by upgrading to Domino 8.5 even if the clients are on 8.0.x or earlier. Some of the benefits available:

  • Disk savings of 40% – 60%
  • Server consolidation
  • Application development modernization
  • Improved quality of service

Dragging Sametime buddies around

I have been playing a little with the drag’n’drop support in the Notes 8.5 beta client and found out that a VCard is created the you drag a Sametime contact to a place that accepts dragging files to (this probably also works in earlier versions). This means that dragging a Sametime buddy to the desktop will create a VCard for that person. Nice! Dragging the buddy to an e-mail (or other place which accepts text transfer) will create a mailto-link.

Just one of those nice, time saving features…