This was the first hands-on lab I've attended in three LotuSpheres. I did enjoy getting a chance to touch the technology, instead of just staring at power-point presentations. Rob Henry, a Notes developer from Toronto, Canada and I used Domino Designer 8 and the Notes client to create a composite application based on a Discussion database. The resulting application contained the All Documents in the top frame, an embedded view in the lower-left frame and an Eclipse component in the lower-right frame. (I shouldn't say frames. They are all components arranged using a GUI in Component Designer.) The composite application was wired together so that when you selected a document in the All Documents view, the embedded view's Show Single Category property was set so that it displayed only documents in the selected document's category, and the Eclipse component displayed the category of the selected document in a field. The example was a bit simplistic, but did illustrate how to create a composite application and see the communication that is now possible between the components. My guess is that Notes developers will primarily use this feature to wire together Notes applications.

I had two concerns about the lab exercise, though. First, the sample database included a form that we used to generate the WSDL for the Discussion database. All we needed to do was to type in the component properties in the form fields and click the [Generate WSDL] button to generate the WSDL. Is it that difficult to create the WSDL in the database directly using the WSDL editor? Notes developers may need to understand the basics of WSDL before they can start creating composite applications.

The second concern I had was that when we used the Component Designer to wire the components together, we needed to type in the Notes URL for the Discussion database. I'd have to think that this will be improved so that you can select the Notes database from an Open Database dialog box of some kind. However, if a component application can only point to a specific Notes URL, that means that a composite application would be problematic for those Notes customers that distribute their Notes applications across multiple Domino servers. But, I'm not going to get too worried about it now. ND8 won't go gold for another five months (at least), and they may include additional features in the Component Designer that would let us determine the location of a Notes application on the fly.

Lotusphere2007

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