Extends IBM Lotus Symphony through Eclipse plug-ins

Introduction: This article introduces how to develop and deploy the Eclipse plug-in in IBM Lotus Symphony by integrating a simple plug-in instance, which enables user customization and extension of the IBM Lotus Symphony.

Brief introduction

Functionally, Lotus Symphony is a set of free office suites that create, edit, and share word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. It supports open document formats (open documents format, referred to as ODF). This means that creating an edited ODF file through Lotus Symphony can also be used by other Office software, such as Open office, that follows the ODF standard. In addition, Lotus Symphony supports import and export of MS Office documents, and supports SmartSuite. LWP,. Prz and. 123 files are imported and exported to PDF format.

Technically, the Lotus Symphony originated from Open Office 1.1, an Eclipse plug-in application based on the Lotus Expeditor platform. In other words, Lotus Symphony is essentially a large Eclipse plug-in package. Figure 1 is the Lotus Symphony frame chart.

Figure 1. Lotus Symphony Frame Structure diagram

Lotus Symphony is both an Eclipse plug-in and an extensible framework. We can extend the Lotus symphony by creating a variety of plug-ins on Eclipse. Newly created plug-ins can access various services, document content, etc. by using the APIs provided by Lotus Symphony to solve specific problems based on the needs of the user. For example, there are a number of symphony users who want to integrate with mail in Symphony Office. When a user finishes editing a document, you can send the document as an e-mail message, either through a specified or default mail program. A useful feature like this can be achieved by using plug-ins entirely.

Next, let's take a relatively simple example of how to create a Lotus Symphony plug-in in Eclipse. By deploying this plugin, we can launch the browser embedded in symphony, visit the Symphony Forum, and post a topic.