Balfes.net

Putting iWidgets in XPages and Domino Web applications

Bob Balfe — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:30:55 +0000

In case you have not seen this entry (like me) on the Lotus Notes and Domino Wiki, there is an article that explains how to add an iWidget to an XPage application.

Enabling iWidgets in IBM Lotus Domino Web applications

technorati tags: Domino, iWidget, Notes, xpages

Should spell check in Lotus Notes remember your choices when you save as a draft?

Bob Balfe — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:05:48 +0000

Unfortunately I have family that uses Lotus Notes and because they know I work for Lotus they think I am their personal technical support. Specifically my cousin has been complaining about this feature for years so I wanted to see who else thinks this would be a good idea. The behavior is, once you do a spell check, save the email as draft and go back to that email later you should not have to re-check the words you already have signed off on.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

technorati tags: lotus notes, spellcheck

Book Review: IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1

Bob Balfe — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:23:57 +0000

Book: IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1, The Upgraders Guide.

I will start by saying this book is a good resource for anyone wanting to know what features are in Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1. The book pretty much covers most areas you would expect in Lotus Notes and is a great overall summary with many examples. I really love the format of the book, it was very easy to follow, very well written, and easy to read. I loved the appendix! The different chapters about add-on products was a great benefit. There were at times I felt like I read some things in one chapter and almost the same thing in another chapter with little value added. I really wish there was more around development techniques and best practices and in general I would have preferred a little more depth in some areas. For instance, there was a lot of material about Composite Applications but most of the information was based on 8.0.x stuff.

There is also a free chapter you can preview: Chapter 8 - which is an extracted Chapter that anyone can check out here, it covers a lot of information and should be quite useful for developers.

Ok, here is my constructive feedback. I will first say that the product documentation is something that needs to be addressed and I can see why many of these areas were not covered, but if you follow the yellowverse you will see the many blogs from IBMer’s, partners, and customers talking about these topics. Since this is an “upgraders guide” it was difficult for me to figure out how hard I should judge on some of the areas. The book clearly hits end user, admins, and developers so I took the liberty to just throw it all out there!

End user and Administrative areas:

Managed Settings - using Domino policies you can push down Eclipse plug-in preferences. They definitely should have mentioned this or walked through the policy screen like they did the Widget policies.

LiveText, Toolbox, and Widgets - arguably one of the most popular areas of the 8.x release and I see a small mention of it in this book. This probably deserves its own chapter considering the new options that were added in 8.5.1. Creating your own recognizers is also a popular topic in the forums.

Serviceability - it would have been nice if the book included a chapter on serviceability. For instance, what the directory structures are, where to find logs, how to look at and evaluate the output from the IBM support assistant. In my experience this stuff is very valuable to companies and admins supporting a rich client.

Developer areas: being a developer myself I would have wanted to get some detailed information about the following areas. It looks like the title of the book was changed from 8.5 to 8.5.1 because the developer chapter only talks about 8.5 and really the content is based on 8.0. So I would update this chapter in a revision to include some of the 8.5.1 enhancements.

XPages - even though this could be an entire book on its own, I think it warranted at least its own chapter. With the introduction to XPages on the client in 8.5.1 this should have been clearly highlighted! You will have to settle for the yellowverse, product documentation and the Designer Wiki.

Eclipse plug-in development - It would have been nice to have a chapter to primer the Eclipse/Java developers - or the want-to-be’s. plugins, Java UI, extensions. On Page 151, the screen shot not the CAE Palette in 8.5.1. It looks like a palette from 8.0 with all of the views in the system loaded into it.

Composite applications - None of the following was mentioned in the book: Container framework, Containers (Document and View, HOD, Symphony, Web), NSF Update Site.NTF, Side bar control. I recommend hitting the Composite Application Wiki, Lotus Expeditor Wiki, and Designer Wiki for these areas.

Lotus Symphony - even though Symphony could be its own book. It would have been nice to see integration with Composite Applications or how to extend Symphony with Eclipse and the JUNO API’s.

Lotus Expeditor - it would have been nice if they mentioned how Portal can manage composite applications for role based application support and also explain the value-add over base Eclipse.

Lastly, for many of the areas I mention about Composite Applications you can get it from the CA Wiki: What’s new in Lotus Notes 8.5.1 & Expeditor 6.2.1. The Domino Designer wiki is filled with XPage material - not too mention many of the business partner bloggers constantly write about XPages.

Also, this review and opinion is my own personal opinion and does not reflect the opinion of my employer or anyone else.

technorati tags: book, Domino, eclipse, lotus notes, review

Online conference for learning Dojo

Bob Balfe — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:00:28 +0000

There is an online conference on February 10th through the 12th (next week!). It only costs $300 and the all day sessions are available after the three day event. Could this be the Lotusphere format of the future???

http://widespreadconferences.com/dojoconnect.html

technorati tags: Dojo, eclipse, xpages

Free charting in Lotus Notes

Bob Balfe — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:44:27 +0000

At the Meet the Developers session someone asked why there isn’t charting tools “free” in the Notes client. There actually is, as I have demonstrated integration with Notes views and Symphony in the past (video 1, video 2, video 3), however, there have recently been a lot of up-take using XPages and Dojo charting. Check out the two postings by Thomas Adrian:

Mix a Lotus Notes view and an xPage Chart in a Composite Application

Dojo Charts in xPages in a Composite Application

Paul Withers also posted a series of articles that you can check out to learn how to use Dojox:

Dojox Charting Tutorial - Part One: Background and Generic Code

Dojox Charting Tutorial - Part Two: Creating Series and Generating the Pie Chart

Dojox Charting Tutorial - Part Three: Column and Bar Charts

Dojox Charting Tutorial - Part Four: Line Chart Via Javascript

A third option, because Lotus Notes is Eclipse based, you can also use BIRT (Business Intelligence Reporting Tool).

In short, it looks like you have a few options to get free charting in Lotus Notes. If you do not want to use Symphony, then XPages, Composite Applications, Dojo, or BIRT are alternatives.

technorati tags: charting, Dojo, eclipse, Symphony, xpages

Closing Poll today: Is anyone using JQuery in XPages/Domino?

Bob Balfe — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:21:47 +0000

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

technorati tags: JQuery, poll, xpages

Excellent article about IBM Mashup Center and Open Social integration

Bob Balfe — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:18:57 +0000

This is a great article to start learning about Web 2.0 aggregation and interoperability between iWidget technology and Open Social gadgets.

IBM Mashup Center: OpenSocial interoperability

technorati tags: iWidget, mashup, open social

Survey: Is anyone using JQuery in XPages/Domino?

Bob Balfe — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:15:57 +0000

I have been playing with JQuery and was thinking about doing some integration with XPages components. I have seen a few posted questions about JQuery but I am not sure how widely used it is in the Lotus community.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

technorati tags: survey, xpages

Make your existing NSF a composite

Bob Balfe — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:59:53 +0000

I figured I would post this since it was asked many times in the Meet the Developer Lab down at Lotusphere. I will also, as promised, be posting some tutorials about the applications shown in AD202.

So you have an existing NSF and you want to make it a composite for any number of reasons. Mostly, I had heard were to get Eclipse views, Java views, or XPage components next to their existing NSF based components or putting XPage components in the side bar. It is actually a lot simpler than you may think. The first thing to do is open the database in Designer and look for the “Composite Applications” entry in the designer elements tree. You will then double click on “Applications“:

You will then get to choose a name for your composite and save it off. That is it!

You now have a composite inside the NSF. If you want to edit the layout and add pages and components to the composite you will need to edit it in the Composite Application Editor (CAE). The CAE is an optional installation when Lotus Notes is installed, this will need to be installed on the system in order for you to edit it.

You then have to change the launch settings for the NSF. This can be done in the database properties right from within Designer. Here you can see in the Application Properties in the Launch tab we simply set the launch type to be “Launch as a composite application“:

The database now opens directly to the “Blank Page” when opened from the Notes client. If CAE is installed you then select “Actions | Edit Application” from the top menu in the Notes client.

From here you can use the CAE to lay out your application.

If you want some great tutorials look at the Composite Application Wiki to get started, Tutorials.

technorati tags: Composite Applications, designer, eclipse, NSF, xpages

XPages, Components, and Plugin development

Bob Balfe — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:08:01 +0000

I just attended a BOF for Plugin development for Lotus Notes, Sametime, Symphony and Expeditor that was led by Mikkel. The discussion was very good and the attendance was also pretty good for a 7am meeting after the engineering party (and then Jelly Rolls)! We had 13 people with very active discussion. The primary feedback I took with me was more documentation, more samples, and more API’s. This isn’t new to me, I hear it a lot. One thing that was interesting was some attendees actually knew there is a lot of plugin development information on the Composite Application Wiki. The discussion then went down the same rat hole of “the CA wiki is hard to navigate”, “it has irrelevant information”, “it is not well structured”, and my favorite was “why isn’t there one place to get all Notes based help”. I think this is all great feedback and I will do my best to get this fixed in 2010.

What I can offer is some things we have done to make it easier to navigate to date. For instance, the Getting Started page is a great place to “start”. It has all of the latest relevant articles and tutorials. Next, the Tutorials category is also a great place to start. The top of the tutorials page has all of the new tutorials we created for 8.5.1.

Lastly for documentation, I want to communicate it is a wiki! If you have content, pointers or information you want to share then please post it or at least post a suggestion to the following page: Suggestions for new wiki articles.

The other topic that got some attention was writing something once and using it across all products or platforms. I sort of led the topic of using XPages as the primary component model - there, you can at least get to run your component both on the web and rich client. Some others brought up Portlet Factory - which can accomplish the same thing using portlet technology. The key here is, Expeditor and Notes ship with a full web container - so you can deploy pre-compiled JSP’s, HTML, Portlets, and now with Lotus Notes 8.5.1 XPage components to the rich client and then standardize on web technology for your user interfaces.

technorati tags: components, plug-in, xpages