Adventures in Expeditor Toolkit

I've been interested in the Composite Application features in Notes 8, in particular the ability to integrate rich client applications with notes. I've had some time recently to start looking in a little more detail. The interesting part is the way in which the PropertyBroker and Wires allows you to connect components together. I thought that I would have a go at creating a simple 'Hello World' example that I could integrate with a notes app.

I've seen the Demos of other composite apps, but there is nothing like rolling your sleeves up and getting into the code. The Expeditor 6.1.1 toolkit is available to use in either Eclipse or the Rational Application Developer and Software Architect IDE. I decided that I'd use the RSA I already had installed.

I followed the instructions and Installed the toolkit - there were no surpises. I then installed the PropertyBroker sample application, ran the application and it popped up under the 'open' menu. It pretty much confirmed that environments were working together - all going according to plan.

The next step was to create my own 'hello world' component.

I chose New > Client Services > Client Services Project, filled in all the default values and chose Rich Basic Application from the list of templates.

This generated some java files, properties and the plugin.xml files. The UI comes named as MainView.java, which you can either open with the Java editor or the Visual Editor. The Visual Editor gives you a graphical view of the Java code - similar to form designing in Domino Designer.

The next step was to add in a 'Hello' world label and then run it in Notes to comfirm that this new project can run in Notes 8


So what next ? I just wanted to see if I could add a break point and would that work with Notes, so I added a break point an ran the component using the Run > Debug menu (rather than the run option) - and yes the breakpoint worked - very cool.

Getting the wires and PropertyBroker working is the next challenge that I'm working through.....