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.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code within text is shown as follows: "The styleActionBar JavaScript function in the ActionBar.js JavaScript library contains just a few lines."

A block of code is set as follows:

function styleActionBar() {
var form = document.forms[0] ;
var tables = form.getElementsByTagName("TABLE") ;
var actionbar = tables[0] ;
actionbar.className += " actionbar" ;
return true ;
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

Dim session As New NotesSession
Dim db As NotesDatabase
Dim doc As NotesDocument

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "On the Basic Notes Client Configuration tab, in the Additional options list, check the Use Web palette option."

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Note

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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