Notes and Domino

Sametime 8 has been released and I have to say it seems to be a big improvement over 7.5. Firstly it actually works on OS X Leopard which 7.5 didn’t. And in my brief usage so far it loads a lot faster and takes less memory once it is up and going. More to come once I’ve used it in anger over the coming weeks.

Well the meetup went well last night with a good crowd of bloggers around over the course of the evening. Of course there was a little talk of the upcoming UKLUG which is next week now. God time goes fast at the moment.

On a completely different note, have a look at this. Me want!

A web application I am working on at the moment needs some reports that can be generated ad hoc by the users. Normally I’d do reports in PDF format using FOP, but the requirement this time was for Microsoft Word documents to be produced. So after a little bit of reading and playing around I found what I think is a neat solution. (Because of this I’m sure someone has done this before so forgive me if I’ve stolen your idea!)

So I have a web application, I created a new view of the documents I want to be able to report on and set a form formula to override the default form when they are opened through this view. Then I created a new form, and this is the key bit, set the content type of the form to Other, “application/msword”. Then the actual Word document can be generated using plain old HTML, but the nice thing is that when you open the document with a browser it will be treated as though it was a “proper” Word document.

That was really badly explained, but you can see a demo here. And if you want to play then feel free to download the NSF from here.

So I’m a couple of days into using Notes 8 so I thought I’d give my impressions.

The first thing to say is that the client is dramatically quicker than Beta 3. This had actually turned into my biggest worry, but there was no need, it feels almost as fast as the classic Notes 7 client, Which may not sounds good but given that I’m running Windows on Parallels with only 512mb of memory allocated I’d say that’s pretty impressive.

Of course the client feels so much more solid than the Beta which was pretty unstable for me. I’ve been doing proper development and using the new Composite Apps and haven’t managed to crash at all yet.

Talking of Composite Apps I have actually managed to get one working which is an enormous step forward compared to my progress last week. This is still the area which feels least complete of the whole client. There are just silly little things which would annoy if you spend a lot of time using them. The “pin” to hold the components tab in place doesn’t work properly, the amount of caching which goes on in the editor in huge. To the point where if you change something you even have to restart the entire client for it to be picked up. I’m not too worried as I won’t be using this stuff again any time soon but for what is a headline feature it’s a little disappointing.

I don’t want to give the impression that there are lots of problems, though, because there aren’t. If I were able I would uninstall my 7 client today and would be happy to do everything in 8. I can’t due to work requirements but rest assured I’ll be pressing to upgrade as soon as possible.

From my point of view Notes 8 is the best combination of improvements in functionality and stability that you could ask for of such a huge product. A big round of applause for the development and testing teams from me.

I almost forgot to mention that a new episode of Taking Notes came out yesterday which features Julian interviewing Mary Beth, Ed, Alan and Rob about the release. Well worth a listen, as always.

Well unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ll know that at about midnight ND8.0 was released. So I’m currently downloading the server and client to upgrade my own installations. Things are likely to go a little quiet in the Domino blogosphere for a few days as we play, but then expect a huge amount offun geeky posts 🙂 So I know what I’m doing this weekend.

Update


OK so this may take longer than anticipated. It seems like maybe lessons haven’t been learned from the Beta download problems. The Download Director keeps crashing and I’m getting about 40kbps download!

Well after the fuss over at Rob’s blog about Composite Apps in Notes 8, coincidentally I had to look at them for the first time this weekend. Unfortunately it’s not been a good experience so far.

Firstly it took three reinstalls of the Notes 8 Beta 3 software to actually be able to use the Composite App editor or the Property Broker Editor. Fair enough to some degree as it’s beta software and my system is hardly standard (an aging build of XP running in Parallels). But still massively annoying. The symptoms were that I’d click Edit Application or “Open” against a Properties WSDL file and then… nothing, no errors, no editors. I have no explanation for why it started working on the third resintall attempt except that I was getting progressively more aggressive in my uninstalling each time, there must have been some setting that wasn’t being cleared out.

So then once I was able to get the editors running I’ve found them to be hugely unstable. To the point where after every click I am saving because when they crash, they go in a big way and take out the whole Notes client, Designer client as well as the editor which is open. Again I can forgive this, and am just hoping it’s a combination of my machine and beta software.

What I am unable to forgive, so far at least, is the fact that I just can’t get a single composite app to work. I took the usual approach of using an existing template as a starting point, the Personal Address Book in this case. As soon as I try and add a property, nothing happens. But again there are no errors to give any hint of a problem. I must be doing something wrong but with no information it’s impossible to tell what. So the next step is to try one of the sample apps linked to by the Composite Apps Blog. I am not trying anything clever here, just following the steps listed but I just can’t get anything to work at all. The apps themselves work fine but as soon as a change is made to them they stop working altogether.

Now I know I’m not the sharpest knife if the cutlery drawer but I do know Notes and Domino pretty well and I also know how to follow instructions. I hope that there is something wrong with my machine, as if there isn’t then this new Composite App lark is just not going to fly.

OK, so it’s Domino peculiarity of the week time.

I have a servlet running on JBoss which needs to access a Domino database on Server B/MyDomain. So I create a session using NotesFactory.createSession(“serverb.mydomain”, “my username”, “my password”). The session establishes fine but when I use session.getCurrenctServer() it returns “Server A/MyDomain”. It effectively means that I am unable to access any databases on Server B.

This became an urgent problem, but we’re only in test at the moment so my short term solution was to quickly build a new server in its own Domino domain. It appears from our current set up that, using CORBA / DIIOP, you are unable to access any server than the one which was originally configured for the IIOP site within a single Domino domain. Can anyone confirm this, because I’m struggling here.

If you have anything to do with Notes and Domino and you haven’t yet tried the Ytria suite of tools, then you owe it to yourself to head over to their site. They have a summer promotion going where you can use the whole suite for free until the end of August. Honestly if you’ve not checked them out please do, they will save you literally hours of your life.

Bruce has posted an set of questions about the state of the Lotus ISV, I suspect the discussion will be interesting.

I’ve spent a couple of hours this evening looking at Kevin Pettitt’s new SuperNTF application framework for new Notes developers. As it stands it’s a very good introduction to best practice development in the Notes client and the plan is to add in an equivalent web framework as well. If you’re new to the Notes and Domino world (and there definitely are still people just starting out there) then this is a very good place to start.