Preparing the IDE for Sametime 7.5.1
I did finally get some time to set-up and try the new Sametime 7.5.1 version with the recently released Sametime 7.5.1 Software Development Kit (SDK).
Since there is no updated IBM Redbook of “Extending Sametime 7.5″ available yet I’d like to outline some of the changes when setting up the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with Eclipse 3.2.2.
Very little to nothing has been changed in the general procedure outlined below:
- Installation of the IBM Lotus Sametime 7.5.1 SDK
- Installation of Eclipse 3.2.2
- Installation of the J9 Java Development Tools (JDT) for Eclipse
- Configuration of the run time environment
- Configuration of the target platform
- Creation of the launch configuration
The Sametime 7.5.1 SDK has been linked before on this side. The installation is not different to the installation of the 7.5 SDK and it is not required to remove the previous version as long as the new software development kit will be placed into a different directory.
Lotus Sametime 7.5.1 is based on the Eclipse 3.2.2 Rich Client Platform (RCP). Therefore it is not required to have the 3.2 binaries available any more to overcome the compatibility issues described before. The Eclipse SDK can be downloaded from the Eclipse home page.
Nothing has changed in regards to the J9 JDT plug-in. Whereas the IBM provided link in the book has been discontinued. I am wondering how long my link to the current version might survive.
So far a lot hat has been common between the previous and the new version. The first major difference can be discovered while adding the J9 runtime environment. The three Java archives harmony_regex.jar, nio.jar and sound.jar have been moved to the same directory (jclMax) as the other libraries. The string library, which contained 3 string classes is not part of the packet any more.
The target platform will of course be the program directory of the Sametime Connect Client 7.5.1. Do not forget to add the Eclipse archives
org.eclipse.platform.source.win32,
org.eclipse.platform.source,
org.eclipse.rcp.source.win32 and
org.eclipse.rcp.source
as additional source code locations for the target development environment.
So far the final step would be the creation of the Sametime launch configuration. As far as I am aware nothing needs to be changed in here. So the arguments for the java application launcher in windows would still be
Xint -Xtrace:none -Xgcpolicy:gencon
-Djava.home=C:\st751sdk\client\connect\j9-runtime\win32
-Dcom.ibm.pvc.webcontainer.port=7777
Explaination to the Java launcher options can be found in the Java Development Kit (JDK) documentation.
The information provided in this article are based on the IBM Redbook Extending Sametime 7.5 – Building Plug-ins for Sametime while considering the amendments required to work with the most recent program versions as well as SDK.
July 20th, 2007 at 1:40 am
Thanks for the indication on the libraries being moved. Using the redbook compared to the actual SW, it is unclear wheter string.jar is needed or not
Keep publishing valuable feedbacks
July 20th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
You may want to have a look into the IBM article Working with plug-ins in IBM Lotus Sametime V7.5.1: Configuring the Eclipse environment that got published some time after my initial posting.
I was wondering as well about the string.jar in particular when 7.5.1 came out and came to the conclusion that this file isn’t required/included any more since the 3 classes has been moved to one of the other three jar files.
August 31st, 2007 at 3:39 am
Many thanks for the information. The redbook is clearly outdated, but thanks to you, I think I’ll be able to finish the installation – albeit not as quick as I expected.