Integrated development of Lotus Domino and IBM WebSphere

For many people, integration is a word that has been overused in the new century, but what does it mean and how can you use it to meet the needs of application development? IBM WebSphere Technology and its integrated solutions address business, organizational, and technical issues. To do this, however, the people who participate in the architecture, planning, and implementation of the solution must agree on the objectives of the project and how to achieve it.

This article describes several of the issues involved in integrating WebSphere and Lotus Domino. We briefly describe how to implement Websphere/domino integration and how to maximize the advantages of these two different systems. This article assumes that you are a developer who is proficient in Domino and/or WebSphere.

Java Standard

Java 2 Enterprise Edition is a specification for standard platforms for development and management of reusable components. These components can be used to provide multi-tier, client-and server-based enterprise applications. Java EE has several implementations, including the reference implementation originally provided by Sun Microsystems, IBM's WebSphere application Server, BEA's WebLogic, Macromedia JRun, and open source j2e E-compatible server JBoss. This article focuses on WebSphere, but this article also applies to applications developed on any of these Java-EE compatible platforms. (The description of this article also applies to WebSphere V4 and V5, although IBM WebSphere v4.0.x is 1.2 compliant, but it also contains many Java EE 1.3 features.) ）

WebSphere takes the approach of decomposing all the execution parts of an application into components that handle different aspects of the entire application. For Domino developers, this decomposition is significantly different from the development and design of domino applications. For example, there is no separation of UI and business logic in Domino. You can encode directly in the form, use the activity (action), or the agent to perform the tasks that you want (although you can disconnect the Domino application from the RDBMS or legacy system, for example, using the Lotus Enterprise Integrator). It is almost impossible for one Domino component to handle the UI only, and the other component to specialize in the business logic.

Java EE component

WebSphere takes a completely different approach. Figure 1 shows the 4 components (customers, user components, server components, and legacy components) that WebSphere has decomposed from a Java-ee application.

Figure 1. The Java EE component of WebSphere decomposition

The Java EE Standard specification further details the interaction between components:

Interaction of user components with server components

These include:

Login (Logging)

Instantiation (instantiation)

Termination (termination)