I'll be the first to admit that I have not and probably will not have a chance to look at this, but it's pretty amazing stuff to me anyway. Sun has released the OpenSSO Project as free, open source software. From the home page:

The Open Web SSO project (OpenSSO) provides core identity services to simplify the implementation of transparent single sign-on (SSO) as a security component in a network infrastructure. OpenSSO provides the foundation for integrating diverse web applications that might typically operate against a disparate set of identity repositories and are hosted on a variety of platforms such as web and application servers.

It's amazing to me because this kind of enterprisey software is traditionally so expensive and so complex. And if nothing else, what other open source projects have this kind of documentation?

via Simon Phipps

---

[ permalink ] [ e-mail me ] [ read/add comments ]

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft and have to admit I'm a big Xbox 360 fanboy so Iwill not be fully objective on this topic.Ever since Nintendo has annouced their new controller, I've had very big doubts about betting the console on such a concept. The controller in itself seems to be beautifully executed and more precise than any other previous attempt at a motion-sensing controller, but I fully agree with Peter Molyneux that for most players, the most confortable position to play is lying on the couch with the controller resting on the beer belly. Only the thumbs move, and they do so very little, which enables us to play for extended periods of time (not that we *should* play that long, but we do, and that eventually makes us buy more...(read more)

I have been doing some thinking recently about what sort of client application model would benefit customers the most. It seems very clear that parts of the web application model are super important (URL deployed, seamlesstransparent install and update, server centric deployment, etc) and we have to provide those in whatever model we build. But there are a few other attributes of web apps (like running the browser frame, navigation, etc) that are also true of web apps today (ASP.NET apps, Atlas apps, etc) but in many ways we have (or could build) the technology to apply all these attributes to out of browser apps as well. So the question I am struggling with is how to think about the end-user model of what runs in the browser or not. That is...(read more)

Hi,

We have business rules stored in form of XML stored in database(DB2 UDB). The columns are of type CLOB. While promoting rules from

As I mentioned in our last podcast, I developed an example application that uses code from my new Stubby database. It started off simple, and then... well, it was hard to know when to stop. Anyway, here's the database:

Weather Fetcher: use web services to get the current weather

It's a 19MB download, so plan accordingly.

I started off with the stub files I generated from Stubby, based on the NOAA web service. Then I wrote some classes to interpret the information that came back from the service (it was raw XML, not a complex class like you'd expect), and wrote an LS2J class to access all that information.

It ended up being pretty cool. As an example, on my local copy of the database if I go to my browser and point to the URL http://localhost/WeatherFetcher.nsf/GetWeatherHTML?OpenAgent&zip=32256 , I get:

The agent is all LotusScript, even though it's using Java and web services in the background. There's also an example of using it in the front-end, to prompt a user for a zip code and return weather information in a messagebox.

Anyway, download and enjoy. Remember that it's Notes 7 only though...

---

[ permalink ] [ e-mail me ] [ read/add comments ]

I just realized today that you can use XPath statements in Notes 7 (using Java, not LotusScript). For example:

import org.w3c.dom.*;
import javax.xml.parsers.*;
import java.io.*;
import org.apache.xpath.*;

DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
factory.setValidating(false);
org.w3c.dom.Document domDoc = factory.newDocumentBuilder().parse(
	new ByteArrayInputStream(xmlString.getBytes()));
Node n = XPathAPI.selectSingleNode(domDoc, "//temp[@type='max']/value");

Nice! That saves all sorts of work when you're parsing XML, once you get the hang of it (and admittedly, I still haven't got the hang of it). For a couple of reference links, Jake Howlett talked about XPath and JavaScript a while back, and there are some nice examples on the Java Developers Almanac (as always).

---

[ permalink ] [ e-mail me ] [ read/add comments ]

Today IBM officially announced Lotus Sametime 7.5, "The world of real-time business".

Instant Messaging. ? Web Conferencing. ? Extensibility. ? Social Networking.

• Lotus Sametime 7.5 web site
• Lotus Sametime 7.5 animated tour
• Lotus Sametime 7.5 US Channel Announcement

Update 08/23: Register for the Lotus Real-Time Roadshow



Make sure to read Lotus Sametime Offerings Manager Adam Gartenberg's Blog for more news and details.

I often find that a SOA is a tough sell.

First from the technology point of view. In most organisations, there is a tight coupling between the

Many thanks to everyone in New Zealand who attended my "ASP.NET 2.0: Tips and Tricks" talk this morning. You can download the slides + samples from my talk here. The samples are number in numbered order and correspond to the slides: Enjoy! Scott P.S. I will also be posting the slides+samples from my LINQ talk a little later today (I first need to jump on a plane to Australia and am running out of timeg>). So stay tuned for those as well. Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! Read More... Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit!...(read more)

The Internet Explorer team maintains a really good blog here: http://msdn.blogs.com/iethat I recommend subscribing to for useful information. They recently posted a good blog post detailing some of the CSS changes that have been made with IE 7.0 to enable it to handle CSS better. This is worth bookmarking if/when you are testing your site with IE7 going forward. Hope this helps, Scott Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! Read More... Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit!...(read more)

SearchDomino.com member Mick Crowder provides a Lotus Notes agent that will allow you to update a specific field in all selected Lotus Notes documents with new data.

The intent of this page is to provide you a list of resources for developing Notes/Domino applications. ?Also see my list of Application Development Tools/Products.

Last updated: August 21, 2006


Application Development Web Sites, Acrticles, Blogs, etc.

developerWorks for Lotus: articles, documentation, tutorials, webcasts, and more.

Lotusphere2006 Session Presentations and Samples from the Speakers

OpenNTF - Tons of excellent open source projects, forums, and good people!

Breaking Par Consulting Inc : web site filled with Notes/Domino code samples, solutions to common programming questions, etc.

CodeStore : Jake Howlett's web site filled with Notes/Domino code, articles, etc.

GeniiSoftware (look on the righthand side for great articles/tutorials on rich text)

nsfTools : Tools for Lotus Notes and Domino - Primarily features tips and tools and utilites for Lotus Notes and Domino administrators and developers. Unless otherwise specified, all the tools available for download from this site have been developed by Julian Robichaux, the author of this site.

Developing BlackBerry Applications for Lotus Domino : BlackBerry provides a variety of enterprise options for developing wireless applications that connect to your Domino Databases. Learn more and download the development resources you need.


Training Material

Lotus Education On Demand: Building Databases with Domino Designer 7
This free tutorial is designed to take you through the steps of building a fully functional Domino database using Domino Designer 7. You will be introduced to all the necessary design elements such as forms and views, as well as actions, agents and outlines. Each part of the course is accompanied by a database file. This database provides completed examples of the exercises in each part.

Lotus Education On Demand: Creating Script Libraries in Notes: This tutorial covers the tasks in creating and implementing script libraries, including: Creating user-defined functions or subroutines, setting up a script library, and incorporating script libraries into Notes/Domino applications.

Lotus Education On Demand: Securing Your Notes Application: This Learning Byte to help you decide how to: Develop a plan that provides the required security for your data and appropriate access for each user, Set up an access control list (ACL), Restrict access to database elements, Create roles to manage access for groups of users, and Control document access.

Lotus Education On Demand: Notes Error Trapping in LotusScript:

Lotus Education On Demand: Logging Notes Application Activity: A NotesLog object can be used to record actions and errors that occur in scripts. This information can be stored in one of the following ways: Notes database, Mail memo , Text file. ?In this Learning Byte, you will learn how to create and populate a Notes database with application activity information.

Redbook - Domino Designer 6: A Developer's Handbook
In this IBM Redbook, we describe how to develop applications with IBM Lotus Domino Designer 6. With Domino Designer, you are able to create applications hosted by a Domino server. These applications can be used by different clients, such as Notes clients, Web browsers or mobile devices.
We introduce, and show in detail, how you can use all the design elements of Domino Designer, such as forms, pages, views, agents, outlines, resources and framesets. Readers who are familiar with developing applications using Release 5 of Lotus Domino may want to start at Chapter 12, which introduces the new features in Domino 6.0, and continue from there.
In the chapters toward the end of the book, we discuss the different programming languages, @functions, LotusScript, JavaScript, and Java, that can be used in Domino. We detail how to manipulate rich text objects by programming, as well as XML, in Domino.

Redbook - Lotus Domino 7 Application Development - This IBM Redpaper shows application developers how to use the powerful, new features in Domino 7 by enhancing an example application.
Chapter 1. An introduction to Lotus Domino 7 application development
Chapter 2. Using DB2 integration to enhance the ITSO Electronics application
Chapter 3. Enhancing the ITSO Electronics application with Web services
Chapter 4. Implementing new design elements in the ITSO Electronics application
Chapter 5. Diagnosing and troubleshooting the ITSO Electronics application

LotusScript: Rich text objects in Notes/Domino 6 Part 1 of 5: This article looks at the new classes for Rich Text objects and provides example code for extracting meaningful data from Rich Text fields, adding new elements programmatically, and controlling the visual style of the database.

LotusScript: Programming views in Notes/Domino 6 Part 5 of 5: This article, fifth in a series on new classes and enhancements to LotusScript in Notes/Domino 6, looks at class enhancements and new features to make elements such as the view selection formula and the view's look and feel programmable.

LotusScript: XML classes in Notes/Domino 6 Part 2 of 5: This article, fourth in a series on new classes and enhancements to LotusScript in Notes/Domino 6, looks at new LotusScript classes for exporting, importing, and processing XML data, with example code.

LotusScript: More XML classes in Notes/Domino 6 Part 3 of 5: Continuing the series on new classes and enhancements to LotusScript in Notes/Domino 6, this article presents examples of XSL transformation to convert Domino data to XML AND HTML, and using the DXL importer to convert XML to NSF format.

LotusScript: The NotesAdministrationProcess Class in Notes/Domino 6 Part 4 of 5: This article, fourth in a series on new classes and enhancements to LotusScript in Notes/Domino 6, shows how to use the new NotesAdministrationProcess class to create scripts to automate common administration tasks.

Lotus Education On Demand: Creating Calendar Views in Notes: The Calendar view is a view style that allows documents, organized by date and time, to appear in a calendar format. This tutorial covers the tasks involved in creating a Calendar view

Building Lotus Notes/Domino calendar applications: Many people use the Lotus Notes calendar "right out of the box." But did you know you can also incorporate calendar features into your own custom-built applications? This article explains how.

Calendar and scheduling features are available through the C API. This section will focus on how to add an appointment or a meeting invitation to a User's schedule, delete a scheduled event from a User's schedule and query a User's busy/free time information.

IBM Lotus Notes Calendaring & Scheduling Schema: This white paper introduces you to the Lotus Notes/Domino calendar and scheduling schema in release 5 and later. It describes the different document types and the fields on each document.

Integrating Macromedia Flash and IBM Lotus Notes/Domino: Flash-based UIs for your Domino-based solutions - Present content and incorporate the design from a Domino view into a Macromedia Flash-based view. With this solution, you can quickly expose standard Domino views for Web users and easily update the design of a single Domino view for both Lotus Notes and Web clients. ?This article shows you how to present IBM Lotus Domino view content in Macromedia Flash, based on and controlled from a flat Domino view. In this way, you can maintain the same design and content presented both in Lotus Notes and in Flash user interfaces (UIs) simply by altering the Domino view.

Consuming Web services from a Lotus Domino Java agent - New in IBM Lotus Domino 7, the Web service design element is a great way to expose services to the world. But do you know how easy it is to use the Apache Axis framework for consuming Web services? Discover how to take advantage of Apache Axis and Lotus Domino 7 technologies to create a Web service consumer.

Julian Robichaux - Setting Up Repeating Dates In Notes - Have you ever set up a repeating event on your calendar in Notes and thought to yourself, "I sure would like to use that functionality in my custom applications"? I have, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how it all works. ?Essentially, there's a hidden LotusScript class called NotesCSEventOwnerDocument that generates the list of repeating dates, based on rules that are specified in the dialog box that allows you to choose your repeat rules. This class is undocumented and probably completely unsupported outside of the standard Notes calendar, but it's such nice functionality that I did a lot of experimentation to try to understand it.

Andre Guirard - Tip: How to update rich text in a document that's open and redisplay it without saving

Andre Guirard - The Complete Reader and Author Field Troubleshooter

Chris Toohey - Context-Sensitive Tabbed Navigation in the Lotus Notes Client : In this article, I'll showcase exactly what we did to facilitate such functionality and ultimately provide our users with a simple, intuitive interface (at least in my and several of our users' opinions)

John Head - Presentations on Notes integration, including The Hitchhikers Guide to Microsoft Office Integration with Lotus Notes and Domino, Extreme Integration - Techniques for Advanced Integration of Office and OpenOffice with IBM Lotus Notes and Domino, and many more.

Julian Robichaux presentation about Web Services:
- Part 1: Introduction to Web Services
- Part 2: How Notes/Domino 7 can play in the world of service oriented architectures.

Julie Kadashevich's Agent FAQ

Justin Freeman - Ho w To Extend Domino Authentication For Websites, Single Sign-on and Persistent Sessions

Richard Schwartz - Links to all things Domino and AJAX related.

Various Contributors - Domino and AJAX demos: Lance Spellman has put together a video highlighting some of the uses of AJAX for Domino applications, including: the Ultimate Web View Navigator by Bob Obringer, View Search by Lance Spellman, Name Picker by Matthew White, and AJAX Crypto by Richard Schwartz.

REDBOOK Lotus Domino and .NET coexistence (April 6th, 2004) : This paper is provides information on Lotus Domino and .NET coexistence. It provides development scenarios where Lotus Domino is the service consumer and the .NET application is the service provider, and the other way around where Lotus Domino is the service provider and the .NET application is the service consumer. The technologies used for integration are Web services and the COM interface.

Technote: How To Send Lotus Notes Mail Messages with Microsoft Visual Basic: The following Visual Basic code will send a Notes e-mail message. The code includes examples of code to include an attachment and to save the sent message, which are both optional and can be removed if desired.

REDBOOK COM Together - with Domino (May 12th, 2000) : This redbook is written for Domino solution designers and programmers, customers, IBM Business Partners, and other members of the IBM and Lotus community who know how to program in BASIC and need a good technical understanding of how to use Domino with COM.

Lotus Notes/Domino 7 application performance: Part 1: Database properties and document collections (31 Jan 2006) : This series covers three areas of application performance: database properties, document collections, and views. In part 1, we will discuss database properties and document collections. In each case, we will point out areas that are most significant and provide concise, real-world examples to help you understand what to do in your own applications. We'll use examples from many applications; you'll probably find that at least one of them closely matches something that you do or that you use. Our goal is to help you build applications that are as fast as they are beautiful.

Lotus Notes/Domino 7 application performance: Part 2: Optimizing database views (14 Feb 2006) : ?In part two of this article series, we explain how you can build views that are optimized for performance in your Notes/Domino applications. ?Over many years of analyzing application performance issues, we found that views are frequently involved in both the problem and the solution. Often, view indexing is the issue. This article explains how this can happen and what you can do to troubleshoot and resolve this type of problem. But there is another kind of view performance problem that has been popping up more frequently over the past few years. This involves views that display reader access controlled documents. The performance problems seen in these views are often not indexing related, so we’ll take a little time to discuss these separately.

Troubleshooting application performance: Part 1: Troubleshooting techniques and code tips (29 Mar 2005) : In part 1 of our article series, we explain a tried-and-true performance troubleshooting process along with an example of how following this process quickly narrowed down a vexing performance problem for a real-life customer application. We also cover some tips to help you optimize view indexing and agents.

Troubleshooting application performance: Part 2: New tools in Lotus Notes/Domino 7 (05 Apr 2005) : In this article, we continue our discussion about identifying and solving performance problems in Domino applications. ?We look ahead to new Lotus Notes/Domino 7 tools that will help you identify trouble spots, and use these tools to identify performance issues in agents that we created to demonstrate the code tips from the first article.

Building PHP-based UIs for IBM Lotus Domino (09 May 2006)- In this article, you learn how to interact with IBM Lotus Domino databases from Web applications created with the PHP programming language. You also learn how to access Domino applications from PHP pages using a COM object, the IBM Lotus Notes application programming interface (API), and XML.

Building a JSR 168 portal application for Domino: In an earlier article, we described creating a DXL framework for working with a Lotus Domino database over the Web. We now turn our attention to building a JSR 168 portal application as a frontend to a Domino database.

Application Performance Tuning, Part 1 (01 Apr 2003) : Part 1 of 2: This article looks at the database, view, and form properties that most commonly affect how well your applications perform.

Application Performance Tuning, Part 2 (01 May 2003) : Part 2 of 2: This article looks at coding practices that can improve application performance. It also examines some common LotusScript methods to see which ones perform best under different conditions.

Maximizing Domino Performance White Paper () : This white paper defines what you can do to maximize the performance of Domino in terms of Web applications from the development perspective and overall server performance from the server adminstration perspective.

The DigestSearch method for Lotus Domino databases (31 Jan 2006) :This article introduces DigestSearch, an alternative solution for working with IBM Lotus Notes Profile documents and for performing simple, high-speed searches. For searching server-based databases from a Notes client, DigestSearch is twice as fast as any other search method available, outperforming both full-text search and LotusScript's GetDocumentByKey method.


Further Resources:

Lotus Notes/Domino Product Catalog

Lotus Notes/Domino Administration Tools

Lotus Domino Catalog

Global Solutions Directory Catalog

Business Partner Application Showcase

For the next few blog entries I'll be discussing tips for making lengthy Notes documents easier for users to read. ?The tips will cover the use of sections, tables, and anchor links. ?Today I'll start with Sections.

Sections are a wonderful Lotus Notes feature which allow you to collapse a lengthy portion of a document down to small, more reading parts. ?Readers can expand or collapse sections to see the part of the document they wish to read.

Sections can be created in two ways. ?1) You can first create a section then add text to it, or 2) You can select the portion of the document you want and turn it into a section. ? For #1, while editing a document from the file menus choose Create - Section.

Lotus Notes will insert a closed, untitled section similar to this:

Pressing ALT+ENTER will bring up the Section's Properties Box, where you can change the title, border, colour, font, and other characteristics. ?

Enter the name you wish to be displayed when the section is collapsed, and choose a border style and colour. ? ?Pay close attention to the border style pick list, there are some really great options (such as gradient fills, boxes, tabs, etc) but you may miss them if you don't scroll down to see more choices. ?On the 3rd tab of the Properties Box, you can change the font (size, colour, style, etc) for the Section's Title.

For method #2 of creating a Section, highlight the text (can be multiple paragraphs, images, anything you'd like) and click Create - Section. ? Lotus Notes will create a new section for you, and even fill in the title based on the first line of the content you selected. ? *You can change the title to whatever you would like using the Properties Box.

It may take a few moments to get used to Sections, so I suggest you practice by creating a fake document and adding several sections to it. ?After a few moments, you will have a good undderstanding for what the various combinations of border types, colours, and title fonts, will enable you to do. ?For example, you can compress down a long document to something like this, where users can easily collapse and expand the section they wish to read.


Finally, you can remove a Section by selecting the title to make the section "in focus" and then from the file menus choose Section - Remove Section. ? This DOES NOT delete the content in the section, it just removes the Section that was "wrapping" the content.

I just created a new project on the OpenNTF site:

Stubby - The Apache Axis stub file generator for Lotus Notes

This database is meant to help you create Apache Axis "stub" files that can be used to call web services from a Lotus Notes client or server. The files that are produced here can be used in Lotus Notes/Domino 7 with NO modifications to the client or server, and NO external library dependencies. I even have an LS2J example agent that uses LotusScript to call a web service, using the generated files.

All you have to do is create a new Stub Doc in the database, enter the URL of the WSDL file you want to make stubs for, and click the "Generate Stub Files" button. Everything you need to start writing an agent will be generated for you!

The magic that happens when you click the "Generate Stub Files" button is mainly controlled by the "StubGenerator" script library. The methods in this library will:

• Read and parse the WSDL file
• Generate stub files (Java source files) in a temporary directory
• Compile those stub files into java class files
• Package the class files up into a JAR file
• Generate sample agent code based on the stub files

The normal course of action after doing all this (it's all done with the single button click) is to create a new Java agent, paste the sample code into it, and use the "Edit Project" button in the agent to attach the JAR file. You now have a working agent that can call a web service!

As a visual, here's a screenshot of a document in the database after you've clicked the "Generate Stub Files" button (click the image for a full-size picture -- sorry for the huge graphic... there are several tabs):

There are several example agents in the database to help you get started.

And in related news, Joachim Dagerot just wrote a great developerWorks article about using Apache Axis to call web services from Notes: Consuming Web services from a Lotus Domino Java agent. His technique involves generating the stub files manually and adding the Axis library as an external reference (whereas the Stubby database uses the built-in Notes Axis libraries), and it's really good material.

---

[ permalink ] [ e-mail me ] [ read/add comments ]

Many thanks to everyone in New Zealand who attended my "ASP.NET: End-to-End - Building a Complete Web Application Using ASP.NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, and IIS7 (Parts 1 and 2)" talk this afternoon. You can download the slides from my talk here. You can then download the application I built here(note: this .zip file is actually the version I published after the US TechEd, but is the same code I wrote on stage today). There is a "ReadMe.txt" file in the root of the demos .zip file that walksthrough how to setup the demos. I've included two versions of the app -- one is in the "IIS7" directory and allows you to run the application using IIS7 on Windows Vista Beta2. The other is a slightly modified version of the sample that also works on IIS5,...(read more)

I found this poll on the Innovation Creators web site: Lotus Notes Email Vs. Microsoft Outlook

"The point of this survey is not to consider blogs and wiki stuff, but instead, just to simply ask users today which tool they prefer as an email tool."

Vote away!

Whileprocrastinating from finishing up my TechEd talks in my hotel room here in NZ, I came across this really funny link of a Microsoft UK employee's "Ten Worst Presentation Moments" that had me laughing out loud. One of my own "interesting experiences" occurred about 9 years ago at a PDC conference. It was the first time I had ever presented as a Microsoft employee, and it was to ~2400 people. I was doing a joint-presentation with another presenter and the plan was that he'd present the first part of the talk for 60 minutes, and then I'd do the second part of it for another 30 minutes. When we got going he unfortunately got spooked, though,and starting speaking super, super, super fast. After watching this awhile I tried to help calm him down...(read more)