In part three of this tutorial we will be leveraging some APIs provided by Lotus Notes to change the behavior of our context menu. We also take a quick look at how to debug your plugins for the Eclipse IDE.
In the second part of this tutorial, we will use what we learned in part one, and create a new client services (plugin) project which will contribute a context menu to Lotus Notes. The video explains everything your need to do, but if your would like more information on some of the topics covered in this video check out the links below.
As part of VideoFest I have decided to create a series of videos on creating your first plugin for Lotus Notes. The first video walks you through installing the Expeditor Toolkit into Eclipse. As I mention in the video you need to install Eclipse 3.4.2 from eclipse.org. You also need to download the update site for the Expeditor Toolkit. In the video I download version 6.2.1, for use with Lotus Notes 8.5.1. However the directions in the video can be used with other versions of the Expeditor Toolkit as well. Here is the video let me know what you think!
Lately I have been thinking about the benefits of making Notes and Domino first class OpenSocial containers. While OpenSocial may not be the most popular specification, especially among typical Domino application developers, I feel like it would have huge benefits if it was integrated into to the platform. It can be used in so many different areas, such as Widgets, NSFs, and XPages.
Lately I have been investigating different ways we share social media. One of the major use cases of social networking sites today is to allow users to share content with others. How useful would Twitter really be if people just posted what they were doing, rather than a cool link they just found, or a funny video they just watched? Most people post links to other content rather than some type of status of what they are doing. The same is true of Facebook. Up until a few months ago when you wanted to share some content on a social networking site you usually just pasted a link into your status. This forced anyone who was interested in the link to leave the site to view the content. Facebook and Twitter have started to change that. Now on Facebook if you want to share a YouTube video, and you pasted a link into your status, it will automatically recognizes that the URL points to a YouTube video and will embedd a YouTube player into your status. #NewTwitter now allows you to expand the tweet to watch the video if the tweet includes a link to a YouTube video. By doing this Twitter and Facebook allow the user to stay at the site and not leave.
Any software developer will tell you that when using APIs the most important help you can have is documentation. When talking about Java, the typical type of documentation for APIs is Javadoc. Often when we produce the jars for our APIs we don’t build them with the Javadoc included in order to keep the size down. Typically you would produce two sets of jars, one for production and one for development which has the Javadoc and sometimes the source. However this model can break down. For example, with Notes and our Client UI APIs we can’t distribute a version of Notes with jars that have the Javadoc included. Therefore our Notes plugin developers have two options. Use the Javadoc in the Help or use the documentation published online. The first option is not always possible since most developers don’t have Notes open when developing plugins. The second option is therefore the next best option.
So I am back from my vacation. It went well, I enjoyed the cruise. While I enjoyed it I probably won’t be going on a cruise for a while now. I would rather go somewhere else instead of being on a boat. I have yet to take a vacation out west so I think thats where I would like to go next. Although I think the next vacation I go on will be my honeymoon 
Check out my pictures from my vacation here.
Two things to celebrate…
