XPages Running in the Notes Client, Composite Applications, Mashups, and Websphere Portal!10/19/2009 05:56 AMImagine taking some of your key Notes applications and adding an XPage front end to some core corporate functionality. Then componentizing those XPages and publishing them as components to your catalogs for consumption. Notes users can then add them to composite applications and take them offline, a Mashup Center user can add them to a mashup along with their sales projection spreadsheet, Portal users can wire them to their dashboards for drill down capabilities. All of this with one development tool, the Domino Designer!
The great thing here is this is not just surfacing your Notes data in these other platforms. This is providing the same Web 2.0 applications and functionality that Xpages delivers in a web browser to these platforms.
There are 2 new design elements/features in 8.5.1 that make all this possible:
- The ability to run your XPages applications in the Lotus Notes client, both on the server or locally.
- The new Component design element that allows you to split up your XPages applications into components for wiring in composite applications. Once you have defined your components, they are immediatley available to run in Notes Composite applications, the Mashup center or Websphere Portal as iWidgets....without any code changes!
All this with minimal design effort required on your part....point and click, drag and drop and you now created a component that has properties and events for wiring.
I have a new article published on The View that goes in depth step by step on how to utilize all these new features. It shows you how to create components and run your XPages applications in the Notes Client, composite applications, Mashup Center, and Portal. You can access the article here: Domino Designer 8.5.1— XPages in the Notes Client, Composite Applications, Mashups, and Portal! (*requires login)
Here's a preview:
Web Client and Notes Client
This is an image of the sample XPages application running in a browser and also running in the Notes client. In this example I am using the same theme. Note the use of the @ClientType() formula in a computed field displaying what client the application is running in. You can use the @ClientType() formula in any JavaScript computable property to tailor the page to the client or the browser.
Notes Client as Components in a Composite Applications
In this screen shot I took the XPages application and created two components from it. It is very easy to add actions for the wiring since there are new client side simple action available. When the customer link is clicked it fires off the events sending the customer name and the customer address. The viewOrders component receives the customer name and filters the orders view to show only the orders for this customer. The Google map receives the address and opens up a street map showing the location.
Mashup Center
This picture shows the same components running in a mashup in the Mashup Center without any changes from the Notes client version! The Domino server projects the components as iWidgets for us so there is nothing we need to do to use them in the Mashup Center....just drag and drop and add the wiring.
Websphere Portal
Here is a screen shot of the XPage component running in Websphere Portal in the iWidget portlet along side two Portlet Factory generated portlets.
This is really an amazing release! It is packed with hundreds of fixes and new features. These new features really open the door to developing applications for platforms that might have been previously out of reach for Domino developers.
A special thanks to Stephan Wissel and Henry Christiaan who helped me troubleshoot issues I was having with the iWidget portlet in Portal. I was having problems getting the portlet to work in my test environment across my VMware servers. The resolution was to adjust the Ajax security settings in the portlet proxy-config.xml to allow across servers and port access. These guys recently demoed similar functionality at the IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 in Macau China. Thanks for your help!
-John
Technorati: composite applications Domino 8.5 Websphere Portal XPages
1. Darren Duke10/19/2009 02:13:53 PM
Homepage: http://blog.darrenduke.net
Oh, so that's what Portal is for....to surface Domino XPages ;)
All joking aside, some great demos of the power of 8.5.1.
2. NICOLAS CALVO ORTEGA03/15/2010 06:55:28 AM
Homepage: http://www.dacartec.com
Hello to everybody !!
I'm developping a xpage aplication and we would like to add this xpage aplication onto our WebSphere Portal. I read this article about iWidget, but I would like to know if this process can to present any problems
Thank You
3. Ajith Peethambaran05/05/2010 05:14:52 PM
Hi,
Its a cool stuff and works fine on web. I placed the Customer orders database on a server and accessed it from few of my machines running Lotus notes 8.5.1. It worked fine in one machine, but it displayed the message "Loading Customer order..." for few minutes and then gave the error "Network Error A communication error occurred: 'Operation timed out' The Web server may be down, too busy, or experiencing other problems preventing it from responding to requests. You may wish to try again at a later time." Any idea of what could be the problem?
4. Ajith Peethambaran05/14/2010 12:04:53 PM
Hi, This is in continuation of the earlier issue that I reported. I was able to figure out what was causing the issue. In the location document, under Basics tab, I had proxy settings. The moment I remove that, XPages start working in notes client. Not sure why is this happening, and I can't afford to remove this proxy setting from each of my users. So, is there a work-around that anyone knows?
5. Guille06/15/2010 08:18:05 AM
Hi everybody!
Is there any way to deploy xpages in notes release 8.5?, I developed an app using designer 8.5.1 but it does not work in the clients, thanks
