The Hairy Bikers Domino Cookbook
Presenter: Bill Buchan & Steve McDonagh
Company: hadsl & AVX

The Hairy Bikers ?
• “The Hairy Bikers” are two hairy
bikers who do cooking
–Simon King & Dave Myers
–Have a BBC Series
• Their web site is at:
–http://hairybikers.com
• Steve and I are both bikers
–And he can cook
• So we thought....

Programming is like Cooking
• Programming is like cooking
–You get a recipe to help you start
–As you get better, you can adapt it
–We’ll give you a short tutorial on each item
• But... You know all about Domino
Programming

This is not...
• This is NOT about Domino Programming
• This is about interfacing Domino to different systems
• Remember:
–A good corporate programmer does not develop
from scratch
–A good corporate developer is there to join up components in
order to deliver results
–Sometimes, the components are outside Domino
–Like a hairy biker, we knock stuff out using the stuff we find

Remember:
• Whilst the business might love Domino
–Other parts of the business use different tools.
• Its part of our job to make it easy
–For those other parts to see our data
–For our applications to use other data
• Not only does that make us gods in our world
–It makes us good corporate programmers to other teams
• Job Security....

So what we going to cover?
• The worlds simplest Lotus Notes Application
–A wee contact database
• Then we access it via a:
–Web service
–Ajax front end
–BlackBerry SmartPhone
–Flex Front End
–.Net Visual Basic Service

We’re focusing on..
• We’re focusing on
–The pros and cons for each platform
–Hacking Developing each solution
–Debugging each solution
• We’re not really interested in the Domino application
- you know all about those
• We’re not delivering production quality code here
–Thats your homework

The Application is:
• The Application is:
–Very simple - single view and Form
–No complex code, validation, error checking
• Remember,
–The application isnt the point of this presentation
–The point is how it interfaces with other systems

The Hairy Bikers Example Db

The Domino Application

Serving Web Services to others...
• Ingredients:
–Domino 7.x or above
–Lotusscript
–Soap UI (http://soapui.org)
–Domino Designer 7 or above
• Level: Simple

How to create a Web Service...
• Create a LotusScript-based web service in Domino
Designer
• Name the class which exposes your methods
• Save the class
• You can access the web service using:
–http://<server>/<database.nsf>/WebServiceName?WSDL
–In any browser
• You can now test the web service using SoapUI
• Demo!

Ajax Applications
• Ingredients:
–Domino 5.x or above
–Lotusscript
–Domino Designer 5 or above
• Level: Simple (if you know javascript)

How to create an Ajax application
• You need to choose a Ajax Framework:
–Dojo is included in Domino and used within iNotes
• Attach them to the application
–Simplest is to embed in the application
• Write forms and views using Javascript for function
and CSS for display
• Test, test, test, and test again
–In all browsers...
• Demo!

Confirmation

SoapUI and the Web Service
• This shows the ‘GetBuddyNames’ Call.
–The SOAP web service call on the left, results on the right

SoapUI and the Web Service
• This shows the ‘GetBuddy’ Call.
–The SOAP web service call on the left, results on the right

Flex Applications
• Ingredients:
–Adobe Flex Builder v3 or above (adobe.com)
–Lotusscript
–Domino Designer 7 or above
• Level: Medium (if you know java)

How to create a Flex application
• Open up Flex Builder
–Do the flex bits..
• Embed the SWF file in a page or form
–Copy+paste the launch code from Flex Builder to the page
• Demo!

Rich Internet Applications...
• Rich Internet Applications allow the developer
to have apps
A. that are connected
B. that are engaging
C. respect user adoption over
technical integration

My experience of using RIA’s
As a corporation we needed :
• Something that would give a unified corporate look and feel
• Something easily localised to 14 languages
• Something that looked and worked the same on all platforms
• Something easily deployable on all conceivable platforms
• Something that could “talk” to multiple data sources
• Something that could produce amazing results quickly

.Net Applications
• Ingredients:
–Visual Studio 2005 or 2008
–Visual Basic or C# skills
• Level: Easy (if you know lotusscript)

How to create an .net application
• Open up Visual Studio 2005 or 2008
• Create a ‘Windows Console’ application
• On the project explorer, create a web service
• Point it at our Domino web service
• Wire in some code...

How to create a .net application
• On Solution explorer, ‘Add Service Reference’
• Point it at our Domino web service:

How to create a .net service
• In my case, I want
to create a .net v2
service, so click on
Advanced,
–Then click on ‘Add
Web Reference’

How to create a .net service
• Enter a
web
reference
name
–The click
on ‘Add
Reference’
–

The .Net Code

Windows Services
• If you want code that will run all the time consider
using a windows service:
–It has a ‘sleep/wakeup’ protocol so it could poll for work on
a regular basis
–If it detects work, it can then spawn worker threads to
execute this work.
–Its harder to install - I used MakeMSI to make the .MSI
installer for my windows services.
–If you call an authenticated web service, where do you
store the username/password ?
• Clear text isnt good enough.

A Quick Gotcha!
• Applications built using
–VS2005 want to use .Net Framework 2.5
–VS2008 want to use .Net Framework 3.0 or 3.5
• Customers in general have NOT rolled out .Net
Framework v3 to their clients, nor their servers
• You can target these projects to use .Net
Framework v2.5 - this may make your deployment
easier

So to round up
• Be very good at Domino
• Be good at other things too
• Domino is not a walled garden
• Everything is a weapon