Monthly Archives: June 2008

A hole-in-one!

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It's not often you get to see a hole-in-one in your life time – I have only personally witnessed two. The first one was my cousin Patrick hit a 3 Wood at Pinehaven Country Club in Guilderland New York – it was 222 yards long and it was amazing.

The second one is very special to me because it happened today on the 17th hole at the Skenandoa Country Club in Clinton NY. It was 180 yards and I hit an easy four iron. The hardest par three on the course and I hit what seemed to be an absolutely straight shot to the hole – which in the end I realized it was. The ball hit about 8 feet short, bounced once and rolled in. I was so shocked, my father says “it's in!”, and my immediate response was “yeah right”. I still have the entire flight of the ball ingrained in my head. I am still amazed with my new Ping Raptures and hitting a Titleist Pro V1 just made it all better – a hole-in-one with style. :-)

To anyone who golfs this is up there with the greatest achievements for a casual player. Given this was the 17th hole and it was my second worse round of the year, I still can't believe it even happened. It was so fun sharing this with all the members and the pro in the club house after. Oh yeah, Billy – thanks for lunch!

XPath article and xpath in Notes 8.5

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One of the things we have in the new Web Application Container in Notes 8.5 is xpath support. I think people should start getting familiar with it (if they aren't already). This makes web application integration with other kinds of components very powerful. You can now define output properties for just about any text on the screen.

Check out this tutorial Brett D. McLaughlin wrote:

Locate specific sections of your XML documents with XPath, Part 1

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Theo's rant on RAD and Notes

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I try to read almost every post on PlanetLotus but lately it has gotten hard to get to all of them. So I now rely on the title of the post and the tool-tip to see if it is something worth my time. I also look at the number of eyes that have clicked the link. Anyway, Theo has a pretty good posting and I don't think many will disagree with him. One comment he made:

I have nothing against composite apps, mind you, but you should use them when needed, not because its the 'new' way of doing things.
Notes is RAD, so let's keep it that way !

You might think since I am the lead for comp apps that I would disagree with him but I don't! I completely agree with him. The bottom line is, composite applications are for integration of components from different technologies and components from different databases. If you do not need this then don't do it! The only thing I would recommend is if you want to think about the future then you might want to consider making your views, docs, etc accessible by other comp apps by making them components up front. Otherwise, design your applications in Designer. If you have god access (designer) to the databases in question then you might want to question whether composites are worth it.

I get this exact question all of the time. My recommendation is to use composites when it makes sense – otherwise use the normal Notes design architecture. Comp Apps give you an easy way to get your new Java plugin components working with and speaking to Notes components.

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How I created the Excel component

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Ok, let me preface by stating this Excel container did not ship in the Notes 8.5 beta. If you seriously want it in the end product please let me know because I think it is slated as a web delivery for the moment.

This is a very basic demo and it still uses the POC landmark editing UI, however I think you will get the point in the end. It shows you how you can define properties and map those properties to cells and cell ranges in a spreadsheet.

Once again, no programming!

click image for video

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Writing Eclipse plugins for Notes 8.5 and XPD 6.2

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As Mikkel has already experienced, you need to using Eclipse 3.4 when developing java plugins for Notes 8.5 or XPD 6.2. We skipped over Eclipse 3.3 for various reasons.

Another small change is the remote debug options. I often write code, deploy it to the runtime through an update site (once) then copy the plugins over from then on. This way I can remote debug my Java plugins using the following command:

C:\notes\framework\rcp\rcplauncher.exe -config notes -debug -clean -console -vmargs -Xdbg:transport=dt_socket,suspend=n,server=y,address=8020 -Xss512k

You can also use the Expeditor toolkit to setup a workspace and launch Notes directly from your Eclipse IDE.

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Notes view container proof of concept

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This video was something I put together to show a prototype of a notes view container using the back-end Java classes. The container is based on the new container work going into Notes 8.5 and Expeditor 6.2. The amount of code to write the container was surprisingly small since I just inherited the Notes view parts. This also means anyone could have created this container using public API's.

In this demo, I show how you can use Formula language for the landmark identifier (more on that term later) and also use formula for the field identifiers. This makes for a powerful combination since you are not changing the database design.

Lastly, I made the notes view containers be intelligent about multiple selections – this is what makes the demo possible. I publish the multiple selections as elements separated by CRLF so the Excel container knows to span multiple rows. I also do the same for a single selection on a multi-value field where the value is concatenated together with a TAB separator – to span columns.

The UI is still the beta UI for the CAE stuff – which is actually already changed but hopefully you get the concepts.

click image for video

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