Mindoo Blog - Cutting edge technologies - About Java, Lotus Notes and iPhone

  • Entwicklercamp 2009: Our sample plugins with source code

    Karsten Lehmann  13 March 2009 01:50:39
    In this post you get the source code and an update site of our sample application that we showed at Entwicklercamp 2009 in Gelsenkirchen, Germany.

    Plugin source code
    You can import the provided plugin source code into any Eclipse workspace that is configured to use Lotus Notes as a target platform.

    One way to do this is to install the Expeditor toolkit in Eclipse. This toolkit can be found in the download area of www.notes.net.
    There is also a manual way for this configuration that is described in the posting "Configure Eclipse 3.4 for Notes 8.5 plug-in development" in the blog of Mikkel Heisterberg.

    Update Site
    The provided update site database contains the binary distribution of our plugins. It is based on the "Eclipse Update Site" design template of Lotus Notes. We added some installation instructions and code that generates a so called "widget" that is used for the plugin installation. That widget is basically an XML file (named "extension.xml") that tells Eclipse/Lotus Notes where to find the plugins to be installed. In our case, it points to the same Notes database.

    "Points to the sample Notes database" means that the widget XML contains the replica id of the database. That's the reason why we generate that widget XML dynamically when you open the database. We grab the current database replica id and write it into the widget XML, so you can create a copy of the database and the widget code is still correct.

    More information about Widget Provisioning can be found in the article "How to use a Notes widget to deploy a new plug-in to an existing Notes installation" from IBM.

    Installing with the widget is pretty easy. Just open the database in the client and drag the widget to the "My Widgets" sideshelf panel of your Lotus Notes client
    (maybe you need to make the panel visible first by selecting the option "Show Widget Toolbar and the My Widgets Sidebar panel" in File/Preferences/Widgets)

    Image:Entwicklercamp 2009: Our sample plugins with source code


    Here are the download links:

    Coming up next are the sample Composite Applications that we demonstrated. Some of them are using the sample application (that we integrate into Lotus Notes in the provided source code) via Composite Application communication to display their data.

    So stay tuned.