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BOOK EXCERPT
IBM Lotus Notes Domino 8 Upgrader's Guide Chapter 9: What's New in Notes/Domino 8 Development
Learn about Composite Applications in this book excerpt.
By Tim Speed, Dick McCarrick, Barry Rosen, Bennie Gibson, Brad Schauf, David Byrd, and Joseph Anderson
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For the past 20 years Lotus Notes and Domino have been the premier collaborative application platform of choice. Small businesses and Fortune 50 companies alike are using the Notes/Domino application platform for email, calendaring and scheduling, instant messaging and applications.
There are hundreds of IBM business partners supporting the community of approximately 130 million users with their daily blogs, web sites, podcasts, and support forums. Any visit to LotusSphere, the IBM's premier end-user conference for the Lotus brand, will leave your head spinning with a myriad of possibilities to integrate Notes/Domino with other technologies in your business.
So, what exactly is the strategy for the future of Notes/Domino development? Given that IBM has a history of protecting their user's investments in the platform, the strategy is obviously one of extension of the platform while continuing to support legacy applications.
All of the applications written for the platform have one thing in common, the end user. The end user operates in a specific context. For Notes/Domino users, this context is one of Notes for collaboration (email, calendaring, and instant messaging), an operating system with its file system for other work such as storage and retrieval of documents, and other applications and office technologies.
The IBM strategy for Notes/Domino is to allow the user, in his or her context, to collaborate more effectively in more and new flexible ways while maintaining the ability to support legacy and new open composite applications.
One way this is being done is by allowing developers new and better ways of taking complicated and related applications, and placing them together to create new conceptual whole applications, or composite applications (applications that are composed of two or more applications). In order to allow this within the Notes/ Domino application platform, IBM has added new development tools and features, allowing Notes/Domino the ability to take part in the new world of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA, see Chapter 3) while continuing to support the rich legacy of applications already built.
Composite Applications
Composite applications are applications that consist of two or more components that may have been independently developed, working together to perform tasks that none of the member applications could perform by itself. Each component publishes and consumes messages from other components, and performs actions based upon user interaction or information received from other components. Support for composite applications is one of the central points for Notes/Domino 8. Composite applications in Notes 8 can wire together multiple components from Notes applications, Lotus Component Designer applications, and Eclipse into a single application context for the end user.
Composite applications, whether they are based on Notes/Domino 8, WebSphere Portal, or Lotus Expeditor, are the "front end" or user interface to an enterprise's SOA strategy. They, in effect, consume the services that are offered by the composite architectures put in place to support SOA.
An example of a composite application would be a simple customer relationship management application. This application needs to display a list of accounts, opportunities, and contacts to end users.
The accounts component should display accounts owned by the end user. When the end user selects an account in the account component, the opportunities for that account should be displayed in the opportunities component, and all of the contacts for the first opportunity should be displayed in the contacts component.
In the application described above, the components are "communicating" with each other by publishing and consuming properties via a property broker. When the user clicks on an account, the account component publishes the accountkey property to the property broker. The opportunities component has been written to "listen" for the accountkey property to be published, and when it is, it performs a lookup into a data store pulling back all the specific opportunities for the published account key. Once it has displayed all of the opportunities for the account, it selects the first opportunity for display and then publishes the opportunitykey property to the property broker. The contacts component then performs a lookup to display all of the contacts for the opportunity.
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Tim Speed is an IBM Certified Systems Architect with IBM Software Services for Lotus. In that capacity, he's responsible for designing, implementing, and supporting various engagements with its clients. Mr. Speed lives in Denton, Texas, and has been an IBM/Lotus employee for more than 12 years in a variety of networking, technical, hardware and software support and consulting positions. He has been working with Notes for more than 15 years focusing on administration roles and infrastructure. He also has international experience with working on infrastructure engagements in Spain, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, the UK, and Indonesia.
Dick McCarrick is a freelance writer who has worked extensively with Lotus Notes and Domino over the years. Dick spent more than 15 years with the Lotus Notes and Domino team, initially as a documentation writer, then later with developerWorks: Lotus. Since leaving IBM, he continues to be involved with Notes/Domino, co-authoring three previous books on this product.
Barry Rosen is an Advisory IT Specialist with IBM Software Services for Lotus. During the last two years, Mr. Rosen has worked on several large messaging and migration projects as well as performed Domino upgrades and messaging assessments. Before that he was a Software Engineer in Lotus Support for more than five years. While in support Mr. Rosen was on several teams specializing in mail routing, Lotus Notes Client, calendaring and scheduling, and server core. He focused on clustering, Lotus Notes for the Macintosh, and rooms and resources. Currently Mr. Rosen resides in Houston. Having graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, Mr. Rosen enjoys following Longhorn sports.
Bennie Gibson is an IBM Certified Systems Architect with IBM Software Services for Lotus. In that capacity, he is responsible for managing various engagements with its clients. Mr. Gibson lives in Wake Forest, NC and has been an IBM/Lotus employee for more than 24 years in a variety of sales, consulting, and management roles. He has been working with Notes for more than 10 years focusing on architecture and infrastructure. He also has international experience with working on infrastructure engagements in Malaysia.
Brad Schauf is an IBM Executive I/T Architect with more than 20 years of experience in the computer services and consulting industry. He has experience with enterprise-wide software and messaging and portal deployments, with a concentration on Lotus Notes/Domino messaging infrastructure architecture, application development, and integration as well as WebSphere portal architecture design and deployments. His experience includes API-level application development and lead programmer, enterprise lead for messaging and portal deployments to General Manager including P&L commitments. He was a founder of a successful IBM business partner before joining IBM in 1999.
David Byrd is an IBM Senior Certified Executive IT Architect with IBM Software Services for Lotus from Fayetteville, GA. He has been an IBM/Lotus employee for more than 9 years in a number of consulting positions covering various technology areas. David has a deep background in virtually all areas of Lotus products and technologies covering areas ranging from low-level API development and collaborative application architectures, to security architectures and messaging architectures. His current focus is on Lotus Quickr as well as other team collaboration technologies and its deployment in enterprise customers. He has worked with Lotus Notes and Domino for more than 15 years.
Joseph Anderson is an IBM Certified Senior Managing Consultant from the IBM Software Services for Lotus team. Joseph has worked with Lotus Notes/Domino, Lotus Sametime, and Lotus QuickPlace since the early 1990s, primarily as a consultant. He is currently working with the Competitive Software team focusing on Domino/Notes administration, migration/upgrade, and security. Prior to working in the consulting industry, Joseph worked in the legal industry as a Director of Operations, where he leveraged his Master of Science in Legal Administration from the University of Denver College of Law.
Keyword Tags: Composite Applications, IBM, IBM Lotus, IBM Lotus Domino, IBM Lotus Notes
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