Monthly Archives: March 2007

Extending Notes 8 with Eclipse and the Domino API's

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Reason why I did this: from my previous posting; I am destined to use Notes as my home mail client and I simply can not live without mail rules. Remember – Notes does not run mail rules on your client so connecting to any POP or IMAP server will not result in sorted mail.

For the longest time you had to get your code into the corporate mail template (which ends up being a nightmare on upgrades), write all of your logic in Lotus Script or C to extend the Notes client and then figure out how to get it to the clients. I am probably going to put this into a more formal article on DevWorks to show the code and how to build it but I wanted to get feedback first and the information out there as Notes Beta 2 has been released. I think you are going to see a lot more of these kinds of extensions from the community and ISV's very soon.

This took me a couple of nights to put together – just to tell you how easy it is to write cross platform UI in Eclipse and get it to the clients in Notes 8 using Eclipse provisioning.

Now remember, anyone can do this. – well anyone who knows Eclipse and Notes programming…

I added the action contribution to the mail views – just like all of the other icons:

You simply click the button and you get the following dialog where you can select which rules to run and then what folder or view to run them on:

Once you click run the dialog closes and you get the standard Eclipse progress bar showing the status:

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Using Notes 8 as my home email client

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Ok, so home use was not the priority for the Notes client all of these years. I think with the introduction of the open client platform (Eclipse) things should change and most likely will with ISV's and open source helping out. I should be able to run mail rules locally for instance! Come to find out, if you use any SMTP server outside of Notes the mail rules simply do not work. They only run on the Domino server, probably in the router task…ugh.

Looks like I need to write some tools. I am going to write a plugin that allows my mail rules to run locally damn it!

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Goodbye Thunderbird, Hello Notes 8 Beta

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Well, I installed Notes 8 M4 on my home PC and I said goodbye to Thunderbird. I did this for a few reasons – one so I can test M4 tools and bugs but more importantly to get back to using Notes for my home email. With the new interface and Eclipse support I can really start to play around.

One problem I had was trying to figure out for the longest time tonight was why I could not connect to smtp.balfes.net over SSL. What a pain in the ass. I finally got the right mix of settings but I needed to add some debug flags to the notes.ini (specifically SmtpClientDebug=3) to see what was really failing.

I finally got a fully working client with these settings:

I also have to mention, I LOVE the side by side preview. I am extremely impressed with the performance – it is just as nice as any other mail client on my machine. Of course I have somewhat of a beefy machine:

Pentium 4 Dual Core 3.2 Ghz, with 2GB RAM.

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