In my first blog I’d like to explain a little about building a plug-in for Eclipse and how to integrate it into a Lotus Notes Client.
The first thing we’ll do is set up your Eclipse environment. I used the RCP edition of Eclipse Ganymede (3.4). I’m sure it’ll also work in other versions but I have not tested those. I’ve only tested on the Lotus Notes Client 8.5.1.
We need to add the Notes JVM for Eclipse to use. The target platform also has to be configured as well as the launch configuration.
When you’re done you should have a working Eclipse environment in which you can develop and test Lotus Notes Client plug-ins. This means you can press the run button and Eclipse will start a Notes Client and run the plug-in in that client. Make sure no Lotus Notes Client instances are open before you run your plug-in project or you’ll get an authorization error.
The next step is to create a plug-in. Create a new Eclipse Plug-in Project and base it on the view template. Make sure to add the ‘com.ibm.notes.java.api‘ dependency to your project. And don’t forget to include the Notes.jar library if you want to be able work with Notes databases in your project.
Eclipse plug-ins work based on extension points. We can extend the menu, toolbars, help, preferences … We now created a plug-in based on the view template. Eclipse can show these views almost anywhere. But for us to show it in the Notes sidebar we have to create another extension based on the com.ibm.rcp.ui.shelfViews. We can then link our view to this one and it will be shown in the sidebar.
With our plug-in up and running, we’ll need a way to make it distributable. And we have to be able to install it into any Lotus Notes Client.
Make a new Feature Project and add our plug-in to it. Afterwards make a new Update Site Project and add our feature to it. Don’t forget to build the plug-ins or you’ll have an empty site.
In your Notes Client, install a new application, add a folder and browse to your site (the folder containing site.xml). You’ll get all the features in this site with each feature displayinh its plug-ins.
Eclipse (and thus the Lotus Notes Client) works with features. Each feature contains one or more plug-ins. You need an update site to make your feature available. A feature is the actual plug-in, integrated into Eclipse.
You should now have a simple view – plug-in that you can install into any Notes 8.5.1 client.
This concludes my first post. Have fun extending 
