Lotusphere 2007 - Day 5

I'm typing this from bed, curled into a fetal position. As long as the vorpal bunnies stay on the dresser I think I'll be okay.

BOF508... the blogger thing

I arrived a few minutes late, thanks to the phone system at the Swan not giving me a wakeup call again. Or maybe I just missed it because I only had about 2 hours of sleep. Anyway...

The session was great, with a lot of good input. Someone asked Ed what was on the horizon as far as vision for IBM (that's a summary). That was discussed a bit, then Ed turned it around and asked what we had seen that we really felt was innovative and would have an impact. At the time the discussion was about the stuff coming out of the IBM Research, which is amazing, but it struck me that everything I had seen so far that's being delivered in Notes 8 would have an impact. Composite apps (which DO NOT REQUIRE PORTAL), usability enhancements, the productivity editors... all that, added up, is like Notes is a completely new product. It's innovative and it will absolutely have an impact.

AD509 - Using web services features in Notes and Domino

This was one of the sessions I most wanted to sit in on. I need to get started with web services, but I didn't really have time to read through the documentation and figure it out on my own. This session provided some cookbook style instructions for getting started, as well as some of the pitfalls to watch out for. Unfortunately I wasn't coherent enough to take many notes, but here are the high points I did write down:

• You can code web services in either LotusScript or Java
  
  
• For Domino 7 it is a publisher only. Notes and Domino 8 can both consume web services. More on that in a bit.
  
  
• There is a Web Services Explorer plugin for Eclipse that lets you interact with web services. This is a great way to test them.
  
  
• Include "lsxsd.lss" to get the XML schema types, fault classes and holder (in/out parameters) classes.
  
  
• Web Services and session based authentication - Web services only respond to HTTP error messages, they don't process HTML forms. Starting in Domino 7.02 you can work around this by creating an Internet Site rule of type "Override session authentication" for the pattern "?OpenWebService". This does require Internet Sites be used for the server running the web service.

New Features in Web Services in Notes and Domino 8

• Both Notes and Domino can consume web services. This is HUGE!
  
  
• Changes to default properties of web services - message format has been changed from RPC to Document/Literal SOAP Message Format. Also, there is a check box to include operation name in SOAP action. I don't remember why this is relevant, but people clapped so it must be a good thing.
  
  
• Interoperability - Literal encoding of arrays. Again, I'm not sure what this means, but people clapped. Also, support for the XML schema datatype element has been added.

In the future

• Web services API for mail and calendar. This will let you use web services to get a user's mail and calendar information, opening that up to pretty much everything on the planet.
  
  
• Work being done on Web Service security
  
  
• Conforming to the WS-I (interop) standard
  
  
• Data type enhancements
  
  
• Validation

BP312 - Trap and manage your errors

Download OpenLog from OpenNTF. It includes everything you need to log your LotusScript and Java errors to a Notes database, instead of just using local logging via the NotesLog class. Version 1.5, which is in beta and will be released shortly, allows you to log JavaScript errors. That's simply amazing. And you can integrate your OpenLog error logging with Domino Domain Monitoring, so your admins can see when your apps are generating errors that might affect server performance. This is an incredibly slick tool, and I'm already cooking up some ideas for making it even slicker.

I picked up way too many side projects this week.