Bob's Blog

VB 6, Mashups, Comp Apps, and more

meta-creation_date: 01/24/2007 01:33:23 Today was a lab day for me at Lotusphere and as always I love talking to customers, hearing their demands and attempting to give them some information that will help them out technically. I was actually shocked to hear how many ISV's and business partners want to leverage Lotus Expeditor to surface VB 6 applications. Apparently there is much concern about the move of MS to stop supporting VB6 and the applications need to be heavily modified to go to a .NET architecture. The other main topic was surfacing anything and having the components "speak" with each other over the Property Broker. I am really glad I got the opportunity to port the broker from portal to the client - it appears to be taking off like very well and people are really understanding it and its value.

I did however get to spend a couple of hours with the family and we did another trip to Universal Studios - this time taking on the Mummy! This is a great ride and if you get to Universal make sure you hit it.

I just finished the Composite Applications and SOA birds of a feather - yes it is only 8:30am and yes it started at 7am and barely no one was coherent. I certainly did not like closing Jellyrolls and getting 4 1/2 hours of sleep but hey - if you fly with the owls you need to sore with the eagles!

Tags: Lotus Expeditor Composite Applications Lotusphere2007

Tuesday and Lotusphere

meta-creation_date: 01/23/2007 02:02:32 I will be in the meet the developers lab starting at 9am but I thought I would catch the start of "ID307 IBM Lotus Expeditor Looks to the Future (R1)" and I am extremely impressed with the turn out. It is almost like there is a small group of attendees that are starting to understand what Expeditor is and what it means for the future of Notes and Sametime. At the Open Source BOF last night we got a lot of "clarification" questions from the group. People are starting to understand both the flexibility of Expeditor and the preservation of their existing Notes applications. We got a lot of questions on composite applications and how Eclipse based components fit into the picture.

Come to the lab and see some demos and code on the Expeditor samples. I will be in the lab until 12:30 today.

Tags: Lotus Expeditor Composite Applications Lotusphere2007

Expeditor is taking off

meta-creation_date: 01/22/2007 15:45:41 With a lot of sessions today on Lotus Expeditor, Composite Applications ,and Property Broker the word is definitely out on this programming model and platform. I gave my talk today and it appeared to be well received by the Lotus Notes community. This is a pretty large Lotusphere with 7K plus attendees the halls and functions are pretty swamped with people. There is a lot of great interest in Property broker, declarative wiring, mash-ups and composite applications in general. Some excellent feedback and desires have been around moving things like legacy VB 6 applications to Lotus Expeditor. On more than one occasion in the first day in the labs this was brought up. I am glad we can give VB developers a path to the future that appears to be more appealing to them than a re-write to .NET.

Tags: programming Lotus Expeditor Composite Applications Lotusphere2007

Composite Application Draft RedPaper

meta-creation_date: 01/18/2007 09:28:24 This is an IBM Redpaper (currently a draft) that I contributed to last year. It shows really great examples of how to create composite applications using the Lotus Expeditor 6.1 client.

Building Composite Applications in Lotus Expeditor V6.1

Abstract
This redpaper covers composite applications for desktop solutions that require multiple types of applications to run in a Lotus Expeditor V6.1 collaboration environment by providing inter-communication between components. SOA composite applications deliver high levels of business services and this redpaper covers the architecture, available tools, component considerations, assembling, deploying and wiring components in Lotus Expeditor V6.1 composite applications. Lotus Expeditor is a client platform for end-to-end smart client application solutions. Expeditor provides services to install and manage these applications and to allow end-users to easily launch and switch among these applications. Expeditor leverages Eclipse technology to provide a client solution that runs on multiple operating systems. The benefits of composite applications include reducing the total cost of ownership for client solutions through reusability of existing components and the sharing of these components across applications, migrating existing applications to run on the client platform until such time as a business deems it necessary to fully exploit the client platform, controlling access to applications based on roles assigned to end-users and improving the end-user experience by allowing composite applications components to easily communicate between them. This redpaper is targeted to architects, developers and administrators who need to understand the implemented architecture to develop, assemble and deploy composite applications in Lotus Expeditor V6.1.

Insidious Tight Coupling

meta-creation_date: 01/17/2007 02:26:09 This months Dr Dobbs has an article written by Bill Lewis (Insidious Tight Coupling) where he explains the good programming practice of interface programming. This should not be news to any developer with more than 6 months experience - or even graduated with a CS degree. What I am hear to preach is there should be a further abstraction when dealing with cooperative components the user interacts with. This abstraction I am referring to is the same one developed for Portal 5+, Lotus Expeditor 6.1 and the up and coming Lotus Notes 8. The concept is simple, make your GUI components act like a well defined interface using WSDL. This means if another component - or code for that matter - wants to interact with your component they only know about the interfaces exposed in the WSDL.

Why does this matter?
It matters because now we have given non-programmers a way to declaratively connect these components. They can use a wiring tool - like the one in Portal or the up and coming Composite Application Editor - to create these applications and get these components talking to each other. So we have not only implemented a good overall discipline but are giving that discipline to administrators and end users.

Take this basic scenario:
We have a date picker control that we know published a Date object when a day is selected. We can then wire that component to any other component that receives a Date object - like a weather report portlet, or a blog site. This now allows a normal person - not a God like developer - to take these components and create new contexts (applications). Think of this as a way for someone to create an interactive Portal where the components can drive each other for specific results.

Tags: programming Lotus Expeditor Composite Applications interface component development

Introduction to OSGI

meta-creation_date: 01/10/2007 14:57:03 Chris turned me on to a posting that is a pretty good introduction to OSGI and Eclipse bundles. Check it out here.

Tags: eclipse osgi

Article on Property Broker in Expeditor

meta-creation_date: 12/19/2006 05:46:59 An article I wrote for Expeditor 6.1 just posted to Developer Works.

Get an introduction to the IBM Lotus Expeditor Property Broker and learn how you can create a component that contributes to the declarative communication offered by the broker. We show you how to wire components declaratively using extension points, the IBM WebSphere Portal Wiring Tool, and the Property Broker APIs.

Creating collaborative components for IBM Lotus Expeditor Property Broker

Tags: lotus IBM expeditor RAD

Expeditor Education

meta-creation_date: 12/12/2006 11:06:36 I just posted this same thing on the IBM Composite Application blog here. I am still struggling with blogging in two places. I want the information to get out but I do not want to have one blog "win" over the other.

The IBM Education Assistant site now has the Lotus Expeditor 6.1 on-line tutorials posted. The Composite Application tutorial can be viewed here, however there are tons of freely available online presentations and demos for all areas of the Lotus Expeditor. This medium is a great way to get educated quickly on the features available in Expeditor.

Some other presentations relative to Composite Applications:

And a heck of a lot more!

Tags: lotus IBM expeditor RAD

Developing an OSGi service as a Web Service

meta-creation_date: 12/01/2006 03:30:08 This is a good article to pass around.

Learn how to programmatically expose an OSGi service running on IBM Lotus Expeditor as a Web service, using the the Lotus Expeditor Toolkit and IBM Rational Application Developer V6. This article also shows you how to deploy and test the service using the Lotus Expeditor runtime.

Article is here.

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Componentizing for Composite Apps

meta-creation_date: 12/07/2006 03:03:23 I just posted this blog entry on the IBM Composite Apps blog. The posting describes how to make sure your Eclipse views can be re-used in the Composite Application Infrastructure in the Lotus Expeditor.

Properly componentizing your code for Composite Apps

Tags: lotus IBM Composite Applications

Officially Announced - Expeditor 6.1

meta-creation_date: 11/28/2006 03:15:27
Expeditor 6.1 has been announced!

I particularly like the section on the Composite Desktop:

Lotus Expeditor is an SOA-based server managed client platform that helps improve responsiveness and increase productivity by extending composite applications to laptops, desktops, kiosks, and mobile devices. It is the IBM open standards-based competitor to the .NET client. It is both used by and integrates with key IBM products such as WebSphere Portal, Lotus Sametime, Workplace Forms, and next version of Lotus Domino^® and also sold as a stand-alone offering.

Tags: lotus IBM Composite Applications

Wiring Eclipse Components

meta-creation_date: 07/21/2006 02:24:28
Composite applications in the upcoming beta release of the Lotus Expeditor are going to be a very big change in the way we develop our components. One of the biggest problems with developing plugins in Eclipse is that your one plugin brings in the house whenever someone else wants to use it. There are definitely some best practices and patterns that need to be followed in order to insure good componentization. One of the problems with the plugin and bundle architecture is I do not think many people realize it is like a white canvas and what you do on that canvas is up to you. For instance, there is no direct tie to UI or a 1 to n forced relationship with anything, it's OPEN! So from a componentization point you need to decide if it is wise to put 5 views or 1 view in a single plugin. Will people only want to use one of my views or will they always use all five.

You should ask that question for every class, package and UI component. If it has any kind of re-usability then you should consider putting it in its own plugin. This way if another application wants to bundle it with their suite they will not have to pull in a whole bunch of dependencies just to use the one view.

In the case of Hannover and the Lotus Expeditor there is no editor in play and pretty much everything is a view. I am already seeing the benefits of have an application assembler build the applications with the portal layout tool and wire the components together the way they see fit. This allows re-usable components to be wired and used in other contexts! Very cool!

Taking Portal Offline

meta-creation_date: 09/12/2006 09:55:58
Here I am, at the U.S. version of the Portal Technical Conference! I have been to several sessions and joined the crew at the booth for about an hour down stairs. I am pretty impressed with the number of people who are attending here. There is definitely some big interest in taking portal applications offline. The locally running JSR168 support is being received very well and also our statements about future JSR286 support. Intercommunication between portlets and SWT components also seems to have interest. We are already hearing of COM and AWT support (which we have AWT today). The Lotus Expeditor ships with support between Eclipse Commands, Portlets, SWT Views and AWT components. Hannover also introduces Lotus Notes components (views, docs, etc) that can also be integrated with the other kinds of components.

I present tomorrow, I will let you know how it goes.

Provisioning Dynamic Applications in Eclipse with no Reboot

meta-creation_date: 07/12/2006 05:56:53
Composite applications are the big buzz around IBM and the industry in general. With OSGI, dynamic plugin awareness and the provisioning API's available in Eclipse 3.2 you can create some amazing applications. I now have a sample up and running with the Lotus Expeditor (previously the WED client) where you connect to Portal 6, download the application XML and the Eclipse Features and Plugins directly after and viola the application launches! No restart of eclipse!

Using the new Composite Application Infrastructure in the client you pretty much get all of this for free. You will be able to create applications using the Portal programming model (pages. portlets, property broker) and have them projected to the client for off-line use.

The ability to install new binaries (plugins) on demand and not require a reboot is because we insure all plugins in the Lotus Expeditor must implement dynamic awareness (the process of plugins coming and going during runtime). Unfortunately this is something you do not get for free with Eclipse and really need to adhere to the best practices as described in Eclipse Rich Client Platform. Lotus is making sure for composite applications things like making a user restart is just not acceptable and I think that is a great stance.

Using Rational Software Architect to do your code reviews

meta-creation_date: 09/03/2006 14:14:38
One of the really cool tools my current group uses is the Code Review feature in Rational Software Architect. I have always thought (and many may argue) that I write reasonably legible code. I try to stick to best practices, make it look clean, well documented and well constructed. Well, unfortunately the default code review did not think as highly of my code as I. It found some great things and I was happy to learn them and change my code for the better. One really great aspect of the code review is that it not only picks out things you may not know but since it is automated it will find things that are just plane mistakes. One of the rules we used was to not allow for the instantiation of a new Boolean object. This is a waste of memory and not needed when you have the static methods Boolean.valueOf().

From the JavaDoc it clearly states:

valueOf

public static Boolean valueOf(boolean b)

Returns a Boolean instance representing the specified boolean value. If the specified boolean value is true, this method returns Boolean.TRUE; if it is false, this method returns Boolean.FALSE. If a new Boolean instance is not required, this method should generally be used in preference to the constructor Boolean(boolean), as this method is likely to to yield significantly better space and time performance.

Parameters:: b - a boolean value.
Returns:: a Boolean instance representing b.
Since:: 1.4

This is just one small example of what automation can give you. I did find many of the errors reported simply annoying because the automation doesn't understand the context of the code however overall the tool is excellent and should be used by all teams that use RSA.

Presentation went well!

meta-creation_date: 09/14/2006 05:35:23
Taking your portal off-line seems to be gaining interest more and more. I was pleasantly surprised to hear how many people are familiar with WED and Lotus Expeditor and also want to have their portlets run in an off-line environment. We also got many requests for running portlets off-line on devices like WinCE and Palm. I was also impressed with the wider knowledge of the Eclipse platform; especially since most of these folks are web-type and portal developers.

Lastly, the biggest interest was in using Hannover components collaboratively with portlets (portal components). I got the most questions around this capability as many in the audience are current Notes customers.

New IBM Composite Application blog

meta-creation_date: 11/08/2006 05:13:41
Bring information and collaboration into the context of your daily business processes using composite applications

This web log is a joint effort by the key technical architects and user experience professionals to open a direct line of communication with developers about the capabilities of user facing composite applications. The primary focus will be on Lotus Notes/Domino, WebSphere Portal, Lotus Expeditor, and future Lotus products to be named later. We will also be commenting on composite application trends that we see in the broader market.

http://www-03.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/CompApps

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More juice on Notes and Eclipse

meta-creation_date: 07/11/2006 10:46:06
A nice little write-up on the impact Eclipse is having on one of the most widely used applications in the IT world (Lotus Notes).

Thanks to Eclipse, IBM was able to produce the Linux version of Notes in just one year--and nearly a year ahead of its original projections.

Even if the following statement may be true; I do not think it will be long before Notes gains its momentum further once Sametime 7.5 and Hannover hit the streets. As he states the business is growing!

The Lotus business has been growing robustly recently, but analysts I talk to believe Outlook and Exchange have more momentum.

Like I have stated, I have been running Notes and WMC on Linux for quite some time now and it is not bad at all.

Referenced Article:
A Ray of Hope for Desktop Linux