Developer-Specific Enhancements

Of most interest to the developer, however, are Lotus Notes and Domino 8 enhancements related to building applications. And here the story is rich. Lotus Notes and Domino 8 tools support the building of composite applications for both Lotus Notes client software and for WebSphere Portal (browser) delivery. Using these tools in conjunction with other IBM Workplace^™ tools, you can craft a Lotus Notes application, a portlet, an Eclipse component, and a composite application to help improve your organizational productivity. These tools include:

• Lotus Domino Designer Lotus Notes and Domino 8 updates Lotus Domino Designer to support user-defined component interaction (loose coupling), when a Lotus Notes application is used as a component in composite application. You can enable this functionality through the familiar Lotus Domino Designer user interface and also with new LotusScript APIs.

  Lotus Domino Designer also provides new design elements to let you easily create Web service consumers in a Lotus Notes application using LotusScript or Java. These Web service consumers can run on the Lotus Domino server and Lotus Notes client, and they support the move to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) prevalent in modern application design.

  The third major addition to Lotus Domino Designer is the refined application support for the optional IBM DB2^® software integration. This functionality allows you to expose Lotus Notes data to be used relationally. It also makes access to relational data possible from a Lotus Notes client or a from a Web browser.

• Composite Application Editor This Lotus Notes and Domino 8 feature enables you to assemble and edit composite applications, and to specify wiring among the components in the composite application to supply loose coupling. You can use this editor to build and modify composite applications stored on a Lotus Domino server or on WebSphere Portal.

These tools and others are discussed in greater detail later in this appendix.