If you are familiar with the embedded browser in the Lotus products you may or may not have heard of BrowserFunction, most likely not! The problem is this class is not very well documented and was part of E4 and is scheduled for Eclipse 3.6. Notes 8.5.2 does however support this SWT class so you can begin to play with it once 8.5.2 is available.
Why is this so important? Well, just imagine, now you can completely communicate between Java and JavaScript using this. You can use the SWT Browsers execute() or evaluate() methods to execute JavaScript from Java and now you can execute Java from JavaScript using BrowserFunction.
This implies you could potentially write all of your UI using HTML/CSS/JavaScript technologies!
The Attachment viewer is such an application, you can check out the code on OpenNTF. I don’t use the BrowserFunction in the OpenNTF version but I have already begun to make an Lotus Notes 8.5.2 version of the plugin that has much better integration with the Notes client. If you are writing side bar plugins and want to standardize on writing in a single technology you should check out the SWT Browser and the BrowserFunction support.
It is kewl indeed! The last missing piece (hint, hint) is handling of drop events from outside into a browser window. How would one do that?
Small correction: BrowserFunction appeared as of Eclipse/SWT 3.5.x.
I thought it was but its very difficult to find 3.5.x documentation on it.