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IBM Lotus Notes runs on Eclipse

Posted by Niklas Heidloff | November 4, 2009


Planet Eclipse readers,

Chris Aniszczyk was so kind to add the OpenNTF blog to Planet Eclipse.

OpenNTF is an alliance of members with the common interest to provide open source applications and samples for IBM Lotus Notes and Domino. OpenNTF has been extended over the last year to be an Alliance of equal members similar to OpenAjax. Legally cleared code goes in a catalog with the last good releases, see for example the Apache catalog.

Since version 8.0 IBM Lotus Notes is based on IBM Lotus Expeditor which is an extension (e.g. Derby database, local web container) of the Eclipse rich client platform. This allows one to extend the Lotus Notes client via Eclipse programming and opens up many new capabilities for application development on the Lotus Notes platform.

As platform Lotus Notes provides additional value through document based storage, data replication with the Domino server, built in security features and many built in collaborative functions like email.

Here are a couple of links to help Eclipse developers to get started with using Lotus Notes as their platform to run Eclipse applications.

First you need Lotus Notes 8.5.1. There is a free version of Lotus Domino Designer available which is an (Eclipse based) development tool for Lotus Notes/Domino developers to build applications via XPages and the classic rapid application development capabilities. This version also comes with Lotus Notes 8.5.1. As the web site describes "Developers may use Domino Designer to build applications that are run locally."

In order to start Lotus Notes from your Eclipse IDE you can install the Lotus Expeditor Toolkit into your Eclipse IDE which provides a UI to easily launch Lotus Notes from the IDE. Technically it is also possible to launch Lotus Notes directly from the basic Eclipse IDE.

There are a couple of places where you can find more information:
- Writing plugins for Lotus Notes
- Lotus Expeditor Wiki
- Composite Applications in Lotus Notes
- IBM Composite Applications Wiki
- Lotus Domino Designer Wiki

Over the last weeks we've started to release a couple of simpler samples showing how to use Eclipse for Notes. Here are some of them:
- File navigator
- Handwriting for Lotus Sametime
- Rich client for Delicious

These samples can be easily installed into Lotus Notes via drag & drop. In addition to Eclipse code OpenNTF has also applications built with other technologies like XPages (e.g. here).

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Comments

 Sean Burgess commented on Nov 4, 2009 1:16:42 PM

Are they working on an option to allow you to add Eclipse plug-ins to the Domino Designer? Or are we going to have to go through the nightmare of trying to figure out what I need to setup my own Eclipse Dev environment to load Expeditor into?

 Simon O'Doherty commented on Nov 4, 2009 2:16:05 PM

Setting up 6.2.1 XPD is much easier then earlier versions (at least I have found). Just follow this page.

{ Link }

 Ranjeeta commented on Sep 23, 2010 12:20:55 PM

I have installed Lotus 8.5.1. Classpath variable has been set to point ncso.jar & notes.jar files. These files has also been added as external jars in the lotus application project properties. On trying to build an existing application , it gives me "Build Path problem" . pls help.

 Alex commented on Jun 24, 2011 3:30:21 AM

Thanks a lot for the links, they are very helful for Eclipse developers.

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