IBM Lotus Domino Designer Release 6 and 6.5: New Features – overview for programmer

 by: Eugene Polyakov

Domino Designer is an IDE, which provides to developers the features for creation, management and deployment of Lotus Domino applications. Version 6.х has new features for applications development, below the most interesting of them are listed:

• Domino JSP custom tag libraries – allows to developers create JSP pages, operating with Lotus Domino front-end and back-end objects. HTTP server included in Lotus Domino, can not manage JSP pages, but any rich J2EE Web сервер (such as the IBM WebSphere Advanced Edition) can translate JSP pages with JSP-tags inside, from Domino JSP custom tag into servlets. Standard Domino Designer Release 6 pack has as description files for JSP custom tag libraries (domtags.tld and domutil.tld), as processing classes for those tags (NCSO.JAR archive). В JSP technology custom tag libraries direct to Lotus Domino objects via POP-protocol by Java/CORBA classes.

• XML support– rather big set of put in LotusScript classes added to Domino Designer Release 6, which supports stream input/output/translation of Lotus Domino objects to XML and back. Thus, the whole Lotus Domino database (including documents, design elements, ACL, header, etc.) can be translated into XML. Moreover, versa verse translation can be done or apply XSLT for getting XML. The chains of translation can be created as Lotus Domino object-> XML -> HTML -> XML -> Lotus Domino object, which will be run in a stream without creation of intermediate XML files. Developers can use only needed Lotus Domino notes for such translations. Standard Domino Designer Release 6 set has also LotusScript classes which process DOM and SAX parsing XML.

• Java support in LotusScript. It is possible in Domino Designer Release 6 directly create Java-session from LotusScript codes and call into it Java-object codes, including AWT visual classes. Using such a tool developers can include into their codes all Java-classes features. For example, possible to provide Lotus Domino data output via visual Java-classes (as a diagram’s variant). This technology provides clear data interface in the both directions between LotusScript and Java.

• New data operation features in Notes Client. The most of Lotus Domino objects become for flexible for programming. It is possible the setting column colors in views programmatically, allowing users to edit or create documents from a view, change programmatically view selection formula of documents to view and column formulas, programmatically delete and add columns to view, setup parameters of views independent of other users, put filters on view information and etc.

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