Portaldomosphere

 Yes - I used to HATE Websphere - and to some extent Portal. And I wondered today - why did I not like these products? (And you are asking why I ask myself question like this on the weekend) The more I thought about this, I came up with many answers.

My first answer came from the marketing that IBM and Lotus subjected us to from some years back. I think the biggest fears about Websphere taking over the Domino arena came with Workplace. Workplace was seen and marketed as the next big thing. Since Lotus was pushing this and just coasting around with Lotus Notes the community felt very much like I did - rejected. We have made Lotus Notes our friend and now the rules were completely changing. Luckily for us, the focus turned back on Lotus Notes. (And lucky for us that Workplace took so long to set up and configure that is was basically not worth the effort to mess with)

My second answer - I LOVE Lotus Notes. I am a yellow-bleeder for sure. I know this down in my heart that this software is like the perfect canvas for me to create something wonderful. So the thought of letting go of that turned my stomach and angered me. How dare they change everything I have been doing...

But the real reason - well, I did not know nor understand or really want to know anything about the Websphere brand. Even in all the training and early working with Websphere products - I still got a bad feeling about it. But in all of this I realized that IBM/Lotus did itself a horrible disjustice. The main reason is that Domino products and Websphere products are completely different. I mean this on all levels. Neither could do the others job - and I mean this in total. Totally from technical to the type of customer who would purchase each for each reason.

So - for all of you who felt this way before - have an open mind and try not to get caught up in the bad feeling you had before.

 Well, as you can probably imagine I am either up late or awake early. If you can believe it, it is the latter. So I have had my cat nap and now it is time to pound back on this code that I am trying to frantically finish. Don't get me wrong, I love developing and administering (that word is a topic for another post) - but I start to get this sense of blurriness between reality and whatever this is. I see it no different than I would imagine an accountant sees his ledger or "The Fake Steve Jobs" sees a bottle of Midol and a cosmo. (I imagine the real Steve Jobs would not order froo froo drinks but.. ehhh) - see, things get blurry

Ok so I need to jump away from the paragraph - and I will not sit here and talk about any of this code until a time where I have not been bangin this stuff out. So, to break montony of my typical confsuing dreck - I give you some rap - from the HP.

 Over the next few days - I wil be posting about integrating Lotus Notes 8 Client and Portlet Factory 6.0.2 Portlets.

Assuming you will want to try this out, you will need the following software :

1. Lotus Notes 8 Designer
2. Portlet Factory 6.0.2 (I will not be using RAD in my examples)
3. Lotus Component Designer
4. Websphere Portal 6.0.1.1
5. Cloudscape 10.1
6. Derby Workbench (optional if you know how to use the command line tools for Cloudscape)

My first post will be in a couple of days.

Ok, so I am trucking along getting this project done and all of a sudden, Portlet Factory (well eclipse) comes back and tells me I have too many 

Main Actions. WHAT??!?!

Well, after looking for a short period of time, I see that some bozo has shoved this VERY IMPORTANT checkbox under the "Advanced" section of the builder. This is usually a collapsed section where you put stuff like localization settings and profiling stuff.

By the way - for those of you who are not getting this... quick explanation. Portlet Factory uses modules called "models". These models usualyl contain elements that handle one type of portlet or maybe one web service with multiple methods. The problem is, you can only have ONE main method, after that you get errors basically. Somewhat like if you could tell Domino to have multiple default forms and someone opens a database and Notes is confused by it.

Ok thanks - that is my irritation for the day. 

 I have a new friend. Its name is HTML Template.

My friend allows me to format my data in any which way I wish within Portlet Factory. All I have to tell it is what field I want to use by using span tags. Sometimes I might say something like :

<tr>

<td><span name="FirstName" /> <br /><span name"StreetAddress" /><br /><span name="City" /><br /><span name="State">  <span name="zip"></td>

<td><span name="LastName /></td>

</tr>

This allows Portlet Factory to fill in the information I wish and where I wish it to go. But make sure you put all the fields that are coming in through your web service in or this gets ugly..... VERY ugly

So remember, when Portlet Factory makes ugly portlets, just use HTML Templates.