Tag Archives: plug-in

XPages, Components, and Plugin development

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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.

Why you don't have to suck at Eclipse plugins…

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My friend and former colleague Juan R. Rodriguez from Everclear Technologies Inc. is offering a 4 day workshop on developing plugins and composite applications for Expeditor 6.2 – which is what Lotus Notes 8.5 is based on.  You can check out the agenda and labs below – you will get a very wide breath of coverage in the Eclipse and Expeditor platform with the principles of componentation and composites applied.  So if you want to impress Nathan or get hired by his team you might want to check out this workshop.

Workshop agenda

  • Workshop Overview
  • Composite Applications
  • OSGi Overview and Architecture
  • Eclipse architecture and the plug-in model, fragments and features, IDE and wizards
  • Expeditor Toolkit and Client for Desktops
  • Creating a Composite Application
  • Eclipse component development – SWT/JFace
  • Component collaboration with Property Broker
  • Fragments
  • Creating Features and Eclipse Update Site
  • Composite Application Editor
  • Integrating existing applications as components
  • Integrating browsers as components to access web applications
  • Browser container components with collaboration
  • Eclipse MVC Programming Design Pattern
  • OSGi and the Event Admin Service
  • Branding applications
  • Personalities
  • Extending the default personality
  • Preferences
  • Integrating AWT/Swing applications
  • Q & A

Workshop hands-on sessions

This hands-on workshop includes the following lab sessions to illustrate how to develop eclipse components and understand what tools can be used to build composite applications:

  • Lab 1 – Hello World and building a composite application
  • Lab 2 – Develop eclipse components using Eclipse IDE
  • Lab 3 – Component collaboration with Property Broker
  • Lab 4 – Creating Fragments
  • Lab 5 – Publishing an Eclipse Update Site
  • Lab 6 – Using the Composite Application Editor
  • Lab 7 – Integrating documents
  • Lab 8 – Integrating web browsers as components
  • Lab 9 – Web browser container
  • Lab 10 – Eclipse MVC Programming
  • Lab 11 – Cooperating components using OSGi Event Admin
  • Lab 12 – Branding your application
  • Lab 13 – Personalities
  • Lab 14 – Extending the default personality
  • Lab 15 – Using eclipse preferences in composite applications

New article: Creating an IBM Lotus Notes 8.0 and later plug-in for IBM Multimedia Library

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A buddy in IBM Software Services for Lotus – Germany, Robert Schneider, wrote  a nice article about plug-in development and using the IBM Multimedia library.  This uses a Features and Plug-in widget to assist in the deployment of the newly created Eclipse artifact.  It is a great tutorial for how these things are connected and then deployed.

This article explains how to create an extension for IBM® Lotus Notes® 8.0 and later that allows you to open a preconfigured URL (for example, Lotus Notes Multimedia Library) in a newly opened browser window by selecting a menu entry in the Help menu.