Jeff Eisen

I was having dinner last night with Dave Millen, the "Director of Real-Time Collaboration Development" at IBM.    That means he is the upper-level manager over the Sametime 7.5 project.  

We were saying that in general at Lotusphere this year, people seem to get the picture of base technology (Eclipse) with platform based on it (Lotus Expeditor) and multiple products built on this platform (Lotus Notes, Sametime, and standalone Expeditor).    Standalone Expeditor gets you the platform to develop and build apps on, but without the Sametime and Notes collaboration pieces.

The one confusion, he said, was people are unsure of and are getting inconsistent information as to the simple question:  "Does a plug-in written for Sametime work in Notes 8?"

So, to clarify, here goes.   Simple question, simple answer:  "Of course, yes".

Now, for some subtlety.   In Eclipse (and therefore Lotus Expeditor and therefore Notes and Sametime), to declare functionality such as that "you are a plug-in that goes in the sidebar", you use a named extension point to register this behavior.   An extension point is just a little bit of XML that typically is written using a easy form based user interface in the tooling.

Well, the confusion comes from the fact that in Sametime 7.5 (already released), the extension point used to declare that something is a "miniApp", namely a Sametime extension, is different than the extension point used in Notes 8 to declare something is in the sidebar.   The sidebar is a Lotus Expeditor (and hence Notes) feature for adding functionality to the right hand side of the top level window.

This difference is a very temporary situation and will be resolved by the time Lotus Notes and Sametime 7.5.1 ships.

So...

1) If you write or have already written a miniApp for Sametime 7.5, then you have to add a small amount of XML to the code to make it work in the sidebar in Notes 8, something like

extension point="com.ibm.rcp.platform.shelfViews"
       shelfView id="shelfid" view="idofviewpart"
extension

(I'm excluding at the moment the HTML less than and greater than signs of the markup, because not quite sure how to keep my blog template from eating it).

2) If you write a miniApp for Sametime 7.5.1 which will be out by when Notes 8 is available and is the version of Sametime included with Notes 8, you simply declare the above extension point when you are building your app and it will automatically work in both places.

Simple as that.

Posted by Jeff Eisen at 05:58:50 AM | Add/View Comments (8)