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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Domino is an application server that can be used as a standalone web server. As part of the Domino suite, it provides a powerful collaborative platform for the development of customized business applications. It provides enterprise-grade e-mail, messaging, and scheduling capabilities.
There are many novice and moderately experienced developers who would like to enhance a Web-enabled Domino application, but to do so they need to learn the fundamentals of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and also how to use those technologies in the context of a Domino application. Information about how to do this is available on the Web, but the sheer volume of that information makes it very difficult for the newbie to get started.
Topics and techniques presented in this book provide a comprehensive overview of all major design strategies used to Web-enable traditional Domino applications. Illustrations provide clear working examples of how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can be incorporated into existing applications to improve both look and performance.
Early chapters provide suggestions for working with users and for managing your development time and effort. Later chapters focus in detail on forms and pages, views, navigation, agents, security, performance, and troubleshooting. Examples demonstrate clearly how to incorporate HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into Domino designs. By the end of this book you will have learned what you need to know to quickly and competently tackle web application enhancement tasks.
Beyond providing a good understanding, this book will continue to serve as a valuable source of ideas and techniques. This book brings together essential classic strategies and techniques used to deploy Domino applications to the Web. Chapters cover all major design elements, with a special emphasis on how to craft these elements to work well with web browsers. Many topics include alternative techniques for solving particular problems. Illustrations and examples can be used where appropriate, or they can serve as jumping off points for your own solutions.
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Seitenzahl: 414
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011
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Table of Contents
IBM Lotus Domino: Classic Web Application Development Techniques
IBM Lotus Domino: Classic Web Application Development Techniques
Copyright © 2011 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: March 2011
Production Reference: 1180311
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. 32 Lincoln Road Olton Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-849682-40-4
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Artie Ng (<[email protected]>)
Credits
Author
Richard G. Ellis
Reviewers
Karen Hobert
Mark Vincenzes
Development Editor
Rukhsana Khambatta
Technical Editors
Sakina Kaydawala
Pallavi Kachare
Manasi Poonthottam
Indexer
Rekha Nair
Editorial Team Leader
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Project Team Leader
Lata Basantani
Project Coordinator
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Proofreader
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Production Coordinator
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Cover Work
Arvindkumar Gupta
About the Author
Richard G. Ellis currently works as a Domino developer supporting several hundred classically crafted, web-enabled applications. He has held positions as a programmer, systems administrator, technical manager, and IT director in major commercial and university settings. He has taught undergraduate and graduate level courses as well as numerous workshops on programming languages and other computer-related subjects. He also provides quality assurance testing and technical writing services for major commercial and educational institutions. Mr. Ellis is certified both as a Domino developer and administrator.
I very much appreciate the people at Packt Publishing for their support and guidance, and the folks at IBM for building Lotus Notes and Domino. I would also like to thank Anne Agee, Kevin Chick, Jeff Clark, Adrienne Connolly, Al Cote, Eric Forte, Corey Kimball, Debbie Magoon, Fred Sollars, and Kevin Suares for their support, insight, and encouragement. Most of all I would like to thank my long-time friend and mentor Mac Toedt for the many opportunities and solid guidance he has given me over the years.
About the Reviewers
Karen Hobert is an IT market research analyst and strategy consultant with deep practical and market expertise in collaboration, communications, content management, and social software technologies. Karen has over twenty years of communication, collaboration, and social software platform expertise that she uses to help organizations design and deploy shared information systems. She has an extensive working knowledge of communication, collaboration, and social technologies including technologies from Microsoft, IBM, Google, and other best-of-breed vendors. Additional areas of expertise include collaborative application design and web development platforms. Karen is a contributor on numerous technical articles and is the author of courses and workshops on programming and deploying web-based business process applications.
Karen is a technical reviewer for the IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 User Guide published by Packt.
Mark Vincenzes is a software engineer at IBM, where he works on web application servers. Over the past 30 years, Mark has contributed to projects such as custom I/O and networking subsystems, database management systems, object request brokers, and source control systems. Mark's past employers include Burroughs, Xerox, Apollo, and Hewlett-Packard.
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Dedication
I dedicate this book to Doreen, my wife and dearest friend for several decades now, and to my children and grandchildren: Jeffrey, Derrick, Caroline, Carrie, Owen, Eileen, and the new grandson on the way.
Preface
Boss: I need some web pages up as soon as you can.
Developer: No problem. I'll get you something before lunch.
Creating web pages was fairly straight-forward in the early 1990's. Today, there are many, often competing technologies available for creating a web experience. Remarkably, all these differing technologies and strategies interoperate in a relatively seamless way to serve the billions of people who use the World Wide Web and the Internet.
IBM's Lotus Notes and Domino product set the subject of this book is a feature-rich, application development technology that has been used to create web-enabled applications since the late 1990's. Since then, it has evolved substantially through several major software versions, and it will continue to advance into the foreseeable future, adapting to the changing web landscape and incorporating new technologies and methods as appropriate.
One of the delightful aspects of Domino is its backwards compatibility. With few or no changes, applications written with previous versions of the software, untouched for a decade or more, will run as expected on the newest Domino server.
It is also important to understand that useful applications can be crafted and deployed on a wide range of platforms with relatively little work. A simple application can be cobbled together and rolled out in less than an hour. It would not be a complex application, of course, but it might suffice for basic data collection or an informational website. After that first version rolls to production, providing immediate benefit to users, features and improvements could be added incrementally with little or no downtime.
Quickly-crafted applications are probably not polished applications in terms of look-and-feel or function. This author has worked with a number of these earlier, rapidly-developed applications; they are still functional, but by contemporary web standards, they are not pretty.
Improving an existing, web-enabled application comes with a number of challenges. How can the design be upgraded without impacting users or disturbing the data?
It was in facing the challenge of working with some of these older applications that I first began making notes which led to this publication.
Getting started
If you are a developer new to Lotus Notes and Domino, you face a substantial learning curve. If you are already a Domino developer, but are new to working with Domino applications on the Web, then the learning curve is not so steep.
As a Domino developer, you must master the Notes and Designer clients, and you must achieve some level of coding competence with Formula Language, LotusScript, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and possibly Java. In addition, you must embrace the Domino way of doing things. You must understand its security features, design templates, replication, workflow, and so on. In a web application, all of these elements work together to achieve some desirable business purpose.
What this book covers
Topics in these chapters offer tips, suggestions, and code snippets to help you understand and resolve specific problems you may encounter when working with Domino applications for the Web. You will likely encounter problems not covered within these pages, but the tips provided here should save you some puzzlement, aggravation, and research time.
Many techniques covered in these pages are now referred to by the Domino community as "classic" or "traditional" web development techniques. Not covered here are XPages and other development strategies that were introduced in Domino 8.5 and later. If you need such information, you must seek it elsewhere.
My overarching intent was to bring together in one place some useful tips and techniques that are otherwise scattered across the Web. Ideas offered here derive from experience, mine and others. Code samples are for illustration only and should not be interpreted as a guarantee of performance or suitability for a specific situation. Everything covered should be useful for versions of Domino 6.5 and later. Domino Designer 8.0 was used to develop and verify all the sample code.
Keep in mind that there are often several ways to create a feature or to solve a problem. While classic techniques work with current and older versions of Domino, the preferred way to create new applications is to use the latest techniques such as XPages. However, even in an up-to-date Domino environment, it may not be practical to redesign an existing application to take advantage of them. If you cannot take advantage of those newer techniques for whatever reason, then certainly use techniques catalogued in this volume. Use what makes sense to you and what works for you. Test thoroughly.
Chapter 1, Preparation and Habits, provides suggestions for developers seeking to improve their knowledge, skill, and productivity. Issues related to executing development projects are discussed.
Chapter 2, Design and Development Strategies, provides recommendations for planning development projects and for developing applications.
Chapter 3, Form and Pages, illustrates selected design choices related to forms and pages, including properties, composing and saving documents, improving layout, using view templates, incorporating HTML tags, and using hidden fields and computed text.
Chapter 4, Navigation, illustrates selected navigational strategies, including application launch options, custom login forms, menus, default error pages, and providing direction and help.
Chapter 5, Cascading Style Sheets, illustrates how CSS rules can be incorporated into applications to style forms and pages for the Web.
Chapter 6, JavaScript, illustrates how client-side JavaScript can be incorporated into applications for such purposes as validating fields, changing element style, enabling a date picker, providing a warning before leaving a form if changed data has not been saved, and retrieving data with Ajax.
Chapter 7, Views, illustrates design choices for displaying views on the Web.
Chapter 8, Agents, illustrates how to incorporate agents in web applications, including setting properties and security, adding error traps, accessing documents, processing selected documents in a view, sending e-mail notifications, and extracting data to a spreadsheet.
Chapter 9, Security and Performance, discusses security planning, implementing security features, tracking document changes, and designing for good performance.
Chapter 10, Testing and Debugging, discusses testing strategies, test plans, tracking issues, and selected debugging techniques.
What you need for this book
To explore the techniques discussed and illustrated in this book, readers should have access to Lotus Notes, Domino Designer, and a web browser. Ideally, readers are able to save sandbox applications to a Domino server for experimentation and testing.
Who this book is for
This book is for novice to moderately experienced Domino developers who are new to the task of web-enabling traditional Domino applications. Readers should be familiar with using Domino Designer to develop applications for the Lotus Notes client. It is also assumed that readers have, or can acquire, at least rudimentary knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
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Chapter 1. Preparation and Habits
A fresh start is invigorating, a chance to look forward with high expectations and new resolve. It's a time to put into practice all the lessons you have learned and to put behind you the issues and problems which previously bogged you down. Take advantage of every fresh start. Look forward to and accept every new challenge and opportunity.
Especially when starting a new job, it is important to take stock of your skills, both technical and non-technical. If you succeeded wildly at your last job or project, then hooray for you! Do it again! But if you fell short in some ways, resolve to do better.
The topics in this chapter address the human and organizational context within which you will develop your Domino applications. Most of these suggestions are relatively non-technical, as they deal with how you might organize yourself and your time and how you might work more effectively with your customers. Topics focus on these key issues:
Preparing yourself as a developer
A craftsman is only as good as his tools, and in a very real sense, you are your tools. To remain capable and versatile, you should commit to the life-long task of continually acquiring knowledge and skills people-skills as well as technical skills.
As you begin your work on a new project, keep in mind the larger picture. This new project will be followed by others. One polished application will lead to another. One happy and satisfied customer will spread the word about how good you are.
Gather a list of public websites that use Domino
While you browse the Web, gather ideas about what makes web pages look good. Great websites should inspire you. Inspect the layout, the use of images and color, and the navigational strategies. If you see an interesting control, peek under the covers and take notes about how it was coded. But be sensitive to intellectual property and copyright laws not everything published on the Web is free.
In particular, collect links to public websites that use Domino and show it to good advantage. Relatively speaking, only a smaller number of public-facing websites are served by Domino. But browse around; you will find hundreds of them in short order. This collection of websites can become a marketing and public relations tool for you as you sell your ideas to your customers.
Too often Domino web applications crafted in the past were functional, but not pretty. That might have been okay ten years ago, but no longer. Today's customers expect the same kind of functionality from your applications that they see elsewhere on the Web. And there really is no reason why you can't provide it to them.
Take some time and build yourself a small application to hold the links. Eventually, roll this application to the Web so that the links can be shared readily with customers and others who are interested.
In this sample Domino Websites application, details about each website are stored in a separate document. The blue hotspots link to views which display lists of Commercial, Consultants, Government, and Other Sites. With sufficient privileges to the database, a user can add, edit, and delete these documents with the Notes client or with a browser.
Get certified in Lotus Notes / Domino application development
Honing your skills by doing is essential. The more applications you build and the more time you spend on this work, the better you should become at it. Experience is a great teacher.
But you do not have time to figure everything out yourself. So you must read and study what others have done, which is especially easy today with a fast connection to the Internet. Set aside some time every week (or each day if you can swing it) and graze the web landscape.
Commit yourself to preparing for, taking, and passing certification exams in Lotus Notes / Domino application development. If possible work through the Administrator exams as well. Effortful and extensive preparation should make it easier to pass the exams the first time. More importantly, preparation for the exams will broaden your understanding of Domino and teach you about features and techniques that you might not otherwise stumble upon by yourself.
And, of course, holding this certificate looks good on the resume.
Use Domino Help
Experienced developers rely on Domino Help. Be aware that there are separate help databases for each of the clients: Notes, Administrator, and Designer.
The Lotus Domino Designer 8 Help database contains over 9,000 documents. In it, you will find extensive information about features, language syntax, classes, limits, errors, tips, and code examples.
The code examples can be particularly useful. If you find some code that looks just like what you need, simply copy it into your application, and then modify it as necessary.
Especially if you are new to Domino, spend enough time with Help to be comfortable with where things are and how to find information on specific topics. The Contents view organizes the information like a book, by general subject area. Use the Index if you know what you are looking for the syntax of a specific @ function, for example. Use the Search feature when you are not quite sure for what you are looking. Beware of searching too broadly. Search for the term "web" and you will find over a thousand documents!
Once you are comfortable with Designer Help, try Designer's context sensitive help, which is invoked by opening or highlighting a design element and then pressing F1. Display forms in the Work pane and press F1 help on designing forms displays. Select a tab in a Properties box and press F1 help on that tab displays, and so on.
Consider using external editors and development tools
Designer provides basic editing for text, so for the most part, you can develop applications without using external editors. However, dedicated editors for HTML, JavaScript, Java, and CSS will provide you with conveniences such as syntax checking, color coding, validation, and ready-made functions which may appeal to you. If you develop code in an external editor, you will have to import the files as resources into your application or copy/paste the text into appropriate locations in your design.
You can reasonably get on without external text editors, but learning to use an image editor may be well worth the time it takes, especially if you do not have access to a graphic designer or a library of images. Almost any image editor will do as long as it saves images as JPEG or GIF files. (Designer can accommodate other graphic types, but JPEG and GIF files are natively compatible with the Web.) Although it may take some effort to learn, the open source program GIMP is a no-cost, feature-rich image editor. Find more information at the GIMP website: http://www.gimp.org.
In this book, except where noted, examples rely on only the native capabilities of Designer.
Create sandbox applications
New ideas for solving problems constantly present themselves. But introducing a new, untried technique into an existing application may result in many more problems than it solves due to unintended consequences and side-effects.
Create one or more sandbox applications in which to try out new ideas. Constraining new development this way facilitates isolating and resolving problems specifically related to the new technique. And if, at the end of the day, the technique does not live up to its promise, then nothing needs to be removed from the real application design on which you are working.
Create a personal cookbook
Solutions discovered or invented for one application inevitably find their way into other applications. Code snippets, strategies, and even entire agents are often reused to save development time and effort.
Keeping track of such ideas may be difficult over a period of years, especially if you work on dozens of applications or move from job to job. It might be inappropriate (ethically or legally) to keep personal copies of designs created for previous employers without permission, but it is certainly reasonable to keep detailed personal notes in one form or another. The tools are readily available: paper notebook, flash drive, optical disk.
Keep your notes organized and periodically review items in your cookbook. Revise and annotate. Include variations and caveats. As it is impossible to remember in detail all the code you will ever write, you will find your notes to be an invaluable resource.
Create a personal document library
As a Notes developer, you should always have access to the Notes and Designer clients, so creating a personal document library or a simple Notes application is certainly an option. You can use the standard Lotus Document Library template or you can simply create your own application with whatever features work for you.
One database might contain notes and descriptions. A second database might contain working examples of many techniques a private code library if you will.
Create a website
The Web is a wonderful repository of ideas. Consider keeping a website (blog or Wiki) on which you can post code and ideas that may be helpful to others. Of course this approach may entail some expense and extra effort, but it is also a great way to contribute to the development community. And if you are a freelance consultant, it is also a way to market your skills.
Alternatively, consider contributing ideas to existing websites with blog entries or even entire development projects.
Adopt new language and terms
Over time, the language of Notes and Domino changes, as do the tools. At one time, the Domino Directory was called the Name and Address Book or NAB. The file that contains design elements and documents was called a database and is now referred to as an application. In Designer, the Design Pane became the Application Navigator. Of course, you will come across references that use the older language and some developers who continue to use deprecated terms out of habit or stubbornness.
Be alert for these changes of terms and the definitions which go with them. Be mindful of the old names, but use contemporary and correct vocabulary, just as you should use contemporary development techniques.
Pay attention to web programming developments and practices
Domino applications intended to be accessed with a web browser can take advantage of many contemporary web technologies like Ajax, CSS, and XML. In fact, support for these standards has been included in Domino for many years. As web technologies evolve, so does Domino.
So pay attention to non-Domino web technologies and strategies. Web-enabled Domino applications should be crafted using the best web programming practices.
Standardizing applications
Application development is part engineering and part art. Building some pieces of an application is fairly routine, while other aspects call for inventiveness and creativity.
Domino caters to developers to some extent by enabling applications to be built with any of the several programming languages. It also supports many web technologies which can be pieced together in an unlimited number of ways. This flexibility enables programmers to work the way they want to work. But this same flexibility makes it all too easy to ignore organizational standards.
Standardizing applications makes it easier to develop new ones since reusable components may already exist. And if applications look and operate in a similar manner, then users of new applications will need less training and will be more willing to use them.
Abide by your organization's web development guidelines
If your organization has written web development guidelines, find out what they are and try to embrace them in your own applications. The set of web applications deployed by your organization is probably much larger than just the Domino applications. If they exist, these development guidelines and standards define stylistic and functional commonality that your organization determined to be beneficial. Someone above your pay grade approved those standards, so abide by them!
Web application development guidelines can provide several benefits. They promote an organizational identity or brand through a common look and feel. They improve the effectiveness and the usability of web applications as a whole by standardizing how features and functions operate. And from a developer's point of view, they speed the deployment of new applications and simplify the maintenance and enhancement of existing ones.
If your organization has no written standards, consider discussing this issue with management. Consider taking on the task yourself.
The number of specific development standards can easily number in the hundreds, depending upon how detailed they are. Whoever determines these standards must understand to some extent the entire universe of options, and then must select those guidelines which make sense and which can be implemented within the existing development environment. Many guidelines turn out to be "nice to have" suggestions that are not practical to implement within the confines of budget and project deadlines.
Development guidelines can be classified roughly into three kinds:
Usability
Guidelines that address the usability of an application or website concern themselves with issues of effectiveness, efficiency, learnability, and overall user satisfaction. How well does this application achieve its goals? How easy is it to learn to use? How well do users like it? Usability influences how willing people are to use an application, which can have a dramatic impact on whether they choose your solution or go somewhere else for assistance.
Usability guidelines focus on what things make a website easy to use from the end user's point of view. Examples of usability considerations include the following:
Explore this topic in greater detail. One online reference which you might consider reviewing is the http://usability.gov website maintained by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The Guidelines documents at this site were written based on the extensive research. They can serve as a good starting point for understanding usability issues.
Style
Guidelines which address style concern themselves with issues of look and feel, and sometimes function. An organization's font preferences and color palette can be identified. Layouts and menu styles can be defined. Acceptable logos and images can be specified, as can boilerplate text for Copyright, Privacy, and other notices. Very specific guidelines might address issues such as whether or not to underline links or how wide margins should be.
Beyond simply specifying preferences, an organization might codify style requirements into common style sheets. The guidelines would then provide information about how to link to and incorporate those style sheets into applications. Details such as style class names for headings and labels would be included.
Mechanics and process
Guidelines which address issues of coding and application deployment can be extensive and no small task to gather together.
Because Domino web applications can include so many different technologies, coding guidelines could address various options, including the use of these design tools:
Other guidelines might specify requirements for the following design aspects:
Still other guidelines might concern themselves with the general way in which applications are designed, tested, and rolled into production:
Some developers might find coding and process guidelines to be onerous and overly constraining. Inevitably, there will be requests for exceptions to the rules, so organizations must be prepared to deal with the issues of exceptions and non-compliance.
Clearly, an extensive effort is required to compile standards and guidelines that are appropriate to application development within the context of a specific organization. Additional effort will be required periodically to review, update, and reapprove those guidelines.
Create libraries of common resources
Organizations should consider creating common repositories of reusable objects. The most obvious kinds of libraries (not surprisingly supported natively by Designer) would contain standard design elements such as:
Images can be organized into common types as follows:
Other repositories might include standard or approved "boilerplate" text:
Common repositories enable developers to work more rapidly and to create products which conform to organizational standards. Organizational management must address the following issues:
Common repositories, like development standards in general, can seriously boost productivity, but they also require ongoing maintenance and commitment. If your organization has such repositories, learn to use them. If no such collections yet exist, speak to management about instituting common repositories for approved design resources.
Planning your work
Volumes have been written about planning, and even more volumes have been written about how to become and stay organized. Here are just a few simple ideas that can be enormously powerful in keeping you personally on task.
Take notes
When you are young and brilliant, your mind might be as sharp as a tack and your memory as long as the Great Wall of China. But as your responsibilities increase, as your projects become larger, as you attend more meetings and deal with more customers as you get older your infallible memory will become fallible.
Take notes. Write things down. Some people prefer to use a laptop or PDA. Personally, after many years of trying several methods, I've come to appreciate the simple notebook. I jot notes all day long at my desk, in the car, at a meeting, in bed at night. It contains my list of tasks, my key contacts, notes from meetings, to-do lists, and timestamps. It is my work-life in a compact, lightweight, versatile package and it works without electricity.
Use to-do lists
It is a simple fact that people who make lists of things they must do, tend to get more things done. This is true on a personal level as well as on the job.
Start each day by making a list of tasks you will work on, meetings you will attend, and phone calls you must make. Keep that list nearby and refer to it often. If things come up during the day, add them to your to-do list. As you finish an item, check it off or scratch it out.
At the end of the day, review what you achieved and what is still undone. Create a new to-do list for the next day. Prioritize each item either in terms of how important it is to do or in terms of when you will do it. This simple activity will help you focus, and when you focus, you accomplish more.
If you are not used to working with to-do lists, it will take some self-discipline. You might also consider creating weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual to-do lists as well. As you plan each day, consult the lists which deal with the longer timeframes and incorporate all relevant items on the daily to-do. The adage "Plan the work and work the plan" can be fulfilled easily with the simple to-do list.
Keep a list of all active projects and tasks
You should maintain a current list of all your active and pending projects, tasks, and commitments. Each item should include a rough estimate of how long it takes or will take, when you might start and finish it, and who the key contacts are for each item.
Inevitably, you will be asked to undertake new tasks, join committees, attend meetings, and perform services which take time. People easily become overbooked because, with an eagerness to please or to start something new, they simply do not estimate well how much time tasks take to do. Keeping a list of projects and tasks to which you can refer will help you and your boss allocate your time more effectively.
Report your progress
Developers and other technicians are often loath to spend time documenting, especially writing progress reports to managers. Managers, on the other hand, really do need to understand what their employees are doing. Well-informed managers can make better decisions when authorizing new work, prioritizing current tasks, handling contrary customers, reporting accomplishments to their managers, and requesting budget for the coming year.
As a developer, you should submit a summary of your work on a regular basis. Your organization may have a prescribed format for this activity. If not, here is a simple outline for weekly e-mail which can work satisfactorily:
Add bulleted items in each section. Be concise, clear, and plain-spoken. Your goal is to convey a sense of your activities and progress to your (possibly non-technical) manager. Send this summary to him or to a project leader at the end of each work week when the information is fresh. Do not embellish, don't minimize. Use this report also to help plan the week ahead.
