www.cubetoon.com - christian's braindump about Lotus Notes/Domino development and administration » Eclipse RCP

Well done IBM – pushing Eclipse preference settings via policy

cubetoon — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 20:07:32 +0000

Only just realised that IBM has gone through the full trouble in order to not only provide us with an easy way to push location, but also Eclipse preference settings to the client via policy.

While I wouldn’t necessary pronounce that it was worth the wait, while applying the workaround in Lotus Notes and Domino 6 to 8, it’s definitely a feature that has been waited for a long time.

Enable File > Application > Install in Notes 8

cubetoon — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:52:56 +0000

Guess this is widely published on the web but since I was searching for this like mad today I have to write it down for the next time I need it.

In order to enable the Eclipse update manager UI in Lotus Notes:

Close you Lotus Notes client
Browse to the plugin_customization.ini in the notes application folder\framework\rcp
Add com.ibm.notes.branding/enable.update.ui=true
Save and close file and restart Lotus Notes

You can now find the Eclipse update manager under File > Application > Application Management.

Preparing the IDE for Sametime 7.5.1

cubetoon — Thu, 17 May 2007 09:50:14 +0000

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.

Sametime 7.5.1 SDK available

cubetoon — Sun, 13 May 2007 09:48:43 +0000

About 2 weeks after the release of Sametime 7.5.1, IBM finally published the Software Development Toolkit for Sametime version 7.5.1 on the developerWorks toolkit page.
The file is dated 27th April but it has not shown up on the download page for the past few days.
While the 7.5 SDK can be used with Sametime 7.5.1 in general, the 7.5.1 software development kit should contain some documentation about the new interfaces and extensions as well as the deprecated classes. Can’t tell what’s in there since I am currently waiting for the download to complete, the trans-pacific connection between the US and New Zealand seems a bit busy currently. Interestingly the size of the 7.5.1 SDK is about 90 MB smaller than the 7.5 one.

Extending the MessageHandlerListener

cubetoon — Sat, 05 May 2007 03:27:25 +0000

Somebody might have recognized as well that the detail level of instructions at the Extending Sametime 7.5 Redbook is getting less the further you are progressing in the book. That’s a concept I really like for two main reasons. First because you don’t want to get told with every new extension point you are using how you have to add the dependency to the project and what steps you have to do to add a new class, secondly because you start running into your first errors and learn a lot about the development as well as the runtime environment while trapping these errors. This time I followed the example for the extension of the Message Event Notification extension point from page 154. Guess what? I ended up with this message:

The type com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.magiccarpet.MessageEventAdapter cannot be resolved. It is indirectly referenced from required .class files

Looking back, after I have discovered the reason for this error message, the whole solution seems to be straightforward.
I actually tracked down the solution for this error in importing the com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.sample.snippets_1.0.3.jar from the sample packet, which comes with the Sametime 7.5 SDK. Fortunately this packet contained the same extension as a sample. So I copied and pasted the whole classes (in this case SampleMessageHandler and SampleMessageHandlerAdapter) into my packet discovering that even the original IBM code did not work. This could only mean that there wasn’t a coding error at all.
After a while I discovered that my packed did not contain the com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.magiccarpet dependency therefore the MessageHandlerAdapter had been unable to reference the MessageEventAdapter which is defined in the *.magiccarpet packet.
I would consider this as another experience to be added to my repository.