Developing IBM Lotus Domino WEB 2.0 Client

Introduction: Create a Web 2.0-style thin Web client for Lotus Domino using HTML and JavaScript. Based on previous articles about the IBM Lotus Domino XML (DXL) framework, this article gives you an introduction to using Ajax to extend Notes/domino applications.

In the article "Accessing the custom DXL framework for Notes/domino data," I introduced you to the Lotus Domino XML (DXL) framework. From this article, you learned how to use this DXL framework to allow other applications to create, view, and update Notes documents. Then, with three lotusscript agents, you learned how to view the DXL document, how to create the document through DXL, and how to update the document through DXL.

In another article, "Building a JSR 168 portal application for Domino", you learned how to create the front-end of a Notes/domino database using the Java specification Requests (JSR) Web portlet.

This article will continue to learn the Lotus Domino DXL framework to build a Web 2.0-style thin Web client for the Lotus Notes/domino Contacts database. We use a flat HTML file hosted on a Domino server with Css/javascript to access the Domino database using Ajax, and we also use some of the elements from previous articles to create this WEB 2.0 client.

This article assumes that you are an experienced Notes/domino application developer and understand JavaScript.

What is Web 2.0?

The term WEB 2.0 was introduced by Tim O ' Reilly at a meeting in 2005. This term represents the next generation of Web applications that are built with the right web design principles and take advantage of the simplicity of HTTP. Some of the most common WEB 2.0 applications include Google AdSense, Flickr, and blogs. Since then, the term has been summed up to form the concepts and trends of a WEB application. The core premise is that these WEB applications use the Internet as their platform and expose functionality as a service that is based on the needs of users or other applications (in other words, these applications are using these services) to provide users with meaningful, content-rich applications. The technologies and concepts for WEB 2.0-enabled applications are as follows:

The latest Web browsers (Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, and so on)

Ajax

Javascript

Dhtml

REST (representational state Transfer, a schema style on which the Web itself is based)