Domino Interface

In previous Lotuspheres, Business Partners who signed up for Business Development Day were able to download the BDD presentation slides. During many BDD sessions at Lotusphere 2008, we were told that the slides would be available. However, if you go to Lotusphere Online there is a message in the Help section that tells you that the slides are not available. Does anyone know what happened?

At Lotusphere 2008, there was discussions about XPages and how it would change how Notes applications are created. Since I was so busy with booth duty and other events I did not attend any of the sessions that involved XPages. However, Rob Burton from my group did attend a session that talked about XPages. Yesterday, he asked if I attended any of the sessions that talked about XPages and I said no. I did briefly hear someone talk about it, but did not pay attention. Surprising he said from what he has learned XPages does a similar thing we having been do for over a year in our Integrated Business Framework system by removing the data from the form. Similar to the concept of XPages, in the Integrated Business Framework design when you open a document you are really opening up a form that can collects data from many databases. The form is automatically populated based on a set of XML configuration data. During the save process the data is stored not as a single document, but the ...

I am finally recovered from Lotusphere 2008. Standing at the booth for 8 to 12 hours a day for three days plus waking up at 5:30 AM to get to the BOFs and breakfast at 7:00 AM and ending at 11:00 PM is very tiring. However, it was worth it. As an exhibitor I believe this was one of our best shows ever. I am very happy with the number and quality leads that we got. Of course, I would not mind even more leads. Our crew did a great job. Our two newbies held together well. The blogger dinner at ESPN was great. I finally had a chance to meet others that I blog with. I hope we get even more to attend next year.

The closing session for Lotusphere 2008 was great. That had the chef from one of the Food Network present and he was a blast. Since I do not have cable or satellite, I do not know who he was, but he was very funny. Does anyone know the final attendance for Lotusphere? I thought they would announce it at the closing session, but there was not any mention of it. From what I observed it was very good. I was so busy at our booth that I missed a number of sessions that I wanted to go to. Today was the first day I had a chance to go to the sessions that I wanted.

Each year at Lotusphere, we look forward to the afternoon coffee break on Tuesdays because there will be either Dove bars Haagen-Daz bars. Rob, my partner was crushed to find out that there was no Dove or Haagen-Daz ice cream bar. Instead, we had healthy italian ice. What is the world coming to?

Our team got to Lotusphere in one piece yesterday. The plane ride was the second worst that I have ever had. I do not think I will need to ride the roller coasters at Universal Studios on Wednesday. The turbulence on the plane ride through the thunderstorm was more exciting than any roller coaster. I believe the attendance is much higher this year considering that auxiliary parking is now back at Blizzard Beach. It is cooler than yesterday, but it sure beat the -10 F back in Chicago.

This is part 2 of my creating composite application for classic Lotus Notes clients. In part 2, I will cover how a new event in Lotus Notes 8 can used to simplify the process of creating a composite application. You can download the demo code from the sidebar or download it from here. This new event is "onSelect" and is found in Notes View. This event works not only for regular views but also for embedded views and even embedded views within a dialog box. This event is triggered whenever a document is selected in a view. It hold true even when the view is display for the first time. As a Notes developer, I feel this one single event is more than enough reason to upgrade to at least the Lotus Notes 8 Basic client. It makes a number of UI issues simply go away. Just like in the previous Lotus Notes clients we need to create a launch document in our composite application that will be used to trigger the population of the frames in the composite application. However, rather than ...

Today, I finally have enough energy to get back to the computer. I was going to spend time this weekend to complete part 2 of creating composite applications for classic Lotus Notes clients, but starting Friday I came down with food poisoning. It was the worst food poisoning I have every had. I was pretty much in bed or laying on the couch for three days. I dranked a couple of gallons of Gatorade in order to keep my fluids in balance. This is the last time I buy sushi from a grocery store! Of course, my wife said, "I told you so." Now that I have more energy, I will complete the composite application discussion in the next couple of days and provide everyone the source code.

A new thing in Lotus Notes 8 is the ability to create composite applications using the Eclipse Lotus Notes 8 client. It is a powerful feature to aggregate visually information from different sources. It leads to a simpler looking interface with powerful results. Since I am an advocate of smaller lightweight clients, I wondered if composite applications could be created for the classic Lotus Notes clients including Notes 5, 6, 7, and the Notes 8 Basic client. The classic clients are much smaller that the Eclipse-based client and loads up much faster than its Eclipse counterpart. After experimenting for a few hours, I discovered that the answer is yes, “you can teach an old dog to do new tricks.” Though, it is possible with the Notes 5 client, it is buggy and I would not recommend it. I have divided the presentation here into two parts, part 1 for Lotus Notes 7 and older clients and part 2 for the Lotus Notes 8 Basic client. The information that I am presenting here is an expansion of a ...

I predict that 2008 is going to be a great year for us in the Lotus Notes and Domino world. Many customers that we have talked to are planning to reinvest in Notes and Domino 8. Lotusphere 2008 looks to be bigger than last year and we are very excited to be back exhibiting at Lotusphere. Later today, I will present part 1 of my two part discussion on creating composite applications for the classic Lotus Notes client. It only took me one day to create the applications and demo, but it has been a struggle to write it up because of other obligations. So far it has taken me a week.