"But. specifically, what does a knowledgeable Notes developer need to do to load and open a plugin just by double-clicking a workspace square?"
What do you mean by the ahove? Do you mean "how to get started with plugin development incl IDE setup etc." or literally "how to invoke a plugin when double-clicking a workspace icon"?

Hi Mikkel,

I would like to  have a small chapter on "how to get started with plugin development incl IDE setup etc."  that would really help people like me to start the plug-in development.

Thanks,

rharan

It's been re-iterated above. And here is my 2.2 cents. I tried doing some plugin development, and managed to get something going but I had to refer to your blog for updated information about Eclipse.

Setup is tricky business because those wiley characters running Eclipse will make significant interface changes even in minor releases that totally re-write the setup instructions. Just to compare, I went through Google's lengthy Android installation process for eclipse and that was smoother and easier than the Notes plugin development plus I knew nothing about Android SDK and I actually got the basic tutorials compiled and running in the emulator.

There seems to be no obvious documentation on deployment, and what I did find was quite dated, early 2009. Once again people in IBM are off doing other "important" stuff rather than keep their technology doco upto date. Perhaps it's there, but I haven't found it, (so happy to be proven wrong on that if someone can point it out).

Finally, testing. I want to be able to test my plugin independently before rolling it out. So, some sort of dummies guide on that would help alot.

The lack of side bar development out there in the real world, is probably an indication of the difficulties in getting started. I know that from my work with Domino servlets, that once you have your environment setup, coding a solution with the Notes-Java SDK is a breeze. So, looking forward to your output on this Mikkel.

Deployment to client AND Domino Designer via policies.

In no particular order:

• What is Expeditor and how does it relate to Eclipse, RCP, and Lotus Notes?
• How to install Eclipse + Expeditor (including a lot of warnings that <span style="font-weight: bold;">versions are important</span>)
• How to create a sidebar app and how to extend the toolbar
  
• What is an extension point and how do I use one? With as many examples as possible, since the extension points that relate to Notes client development aren't listed anywhere that I know of.
• How to interact with Notes data and Notes views, including a discussion on threading
• How to develop an app that works on both version 8.0 and 8.5
• Introduction to SWT, especially layouts and listeners
• Lifecycle of a plugin (from Notes startup to shutdown)
• Creating and understanding Features and Update Sites
• Deploying plugins via update site, via widget catalog, and via widget XML files, including information about the backend provisioning process
• How to sign a plugin
• How to debug a plugin
• Extending the standard Notes widgets, like web pages and live text
• Things an administrator can do (accidentally or intentionally) to affect plugin installation and/or capabilities, including plugin-related policies and options in the preferences file

If I think of anything else I'll let you know.
:-)

- Julian

<div>Not just about deployment to the client, but specifically how develop/distribute plugins (and widgets) to make it PAINLESSLY EASY for end-users to install them on their Notes desktops.</div> <div></div> <div>None of this nonsense, for example, of having to add that "branding" line to the plugin-customization.ini file.</div> <div></div> <div>There should be a standardized naming of files -- such as always name your file "extension.xml" (or whatever) and place it PROMINENTLY on each plug-in's website page so that an end-user easily finds it and doesn't have to think twice about merely having to drag it onto their Notes sidebar -- if you get my drift.</div>

+1 for @Stephan and @Julian above! In no particular order:

• How to install and setup Eclipse + Notes (Linux, Mac, Windows) with different versions
• How to install and setup Eclipse + Expeditor + Notes (Linux, Mac, Windows) with different versions
• How to configure a developer environment running different versions of Eclipse, Expeditor and Notes... if it is needed at all?
• How to create a plugin that dynamically add action buttons to a database view without changing the database
• How to sign and deploy plugins, widgets etc.
• How to create a plugin with third-party API's (fx. Apache) for use by other plugins
• How to interact between traditional Notes database design and sidebars (listeners etc.)
• How to interact between traditional Notes database design and XPages within sidebars
• How to trigger resize, dock/undock of a sidebar
• How to use the different kind of browsers in the platform (embedded, ...) and maybe a comparison of their functionalities and possibilities

And, of course, for all of the examples you create please make them cross-platform! I'd hate see a wiki like this containing source that requires Windows. Notes is not officially running on Linux, Mac and Windows, so let the wiki be build on that. Do you know if the wiki will go officially "beta" at some point, so we can comment on your progress?

Thanks! By the way... a typing error occurred in my last post. "Notes is not officially running on..." should of course have been: "Notes is now officially running on..." What a mistake :-D

I have been developing notes plugins for 1.5 years and the lack of documentation has been a real sore point.  Glad to see you guys working on this.  Here is what I wish I could find documentation on.  I have stumbled in the dark to find out much of this stuff and I think future developers would benefit from documentation.

Development
1) Sametime awareness in another plugin
 There are some samples out there but they are scattered.  There are multiple ways to do this depending on whether the application has a direct or indirect link into sametime.  (Indirect would be implicitedly requesting a person's status, Direct would be resolving the person object from the sametime client based on past chats, etc.)

2) CSS in SWidgets
 The handful of good examples I have found are in chinese.  All of these seem to require changing themes and I have not seen any samples where you could define the styles of your SWidgets without changing themes. 
 
3) Live text in detail
Livetext has the potential to be VERY useful within plugins but there is hardly any documentation. This documentation would be on how to integrate live text with plugins and not widgets, since widgets seem thoroughly documentated in this aspect.  We need to know how to add a contribution to the eclipse menu so that a plugin can react to it (much like your Blog already covers) and also how to do the opposite, have data within a SWT plugin that reacts on Live Text you have defined.

4) Important extension points and packages for different tasks
We know the obvious like sideshelf, but what about the less documented that could be useful?  I see we have extension points available for com.ibm.rcp.toolbox, com.ibm.rcp.content, com.ibm.rcp.autorecognizer, etc. but there is no documentation. 

5) Pros and Cons as far as eclipse extension points/packages vs IBM extension points/packages.  When would use an STable over a Table? (I noticed that STable adds new functionality but it can be VERY rigid and not allow much modification).

6) Limitations.  Are there any practical limitations to what you cannot do within the environment and certain packages?  For example, is Live Text being recognized from within an SWT control just not possible due to limitations?

Testing and Deployment
An overall testing and deployment of plugins guide would be very useful.  Perhaps this should be a seperate red book.

1) How do you write automated tests for plugins?  Is JUnit recommended? Is UI worth testing? Etc.
2) How do you automatically build plugins?  Is it worth using something like Maven or just an ant script?  For example, I was playing around with an ant script to build the feature, update site, extension.xml but it was not very portable between plugins.  There is also an issue that if I place something like @VERSION@ in the plugin.xml it causes the plugin to not compile.  This would lead to something like 8 things needed to be changed/kept an eye on between plugins.
3) How do you automate signing of plugins after build?
4) Why is creating the extension.xml manual? How can I automate it?
5) I want to automate everything in the plugin development/deployment process that I can.  Are there painpoints where it just won't be possible? For example, getting it into the catalog/update site?

Policy
4) How do you add the signing certificate to the client so that it knows that it is trusted?  (We used a mail template change, but is there a better way).


A little side note.  It would be VERY amazing if IBM could bundle the expeditor toolkit with eclipse and provide it to developers so they wouldn't have to go through the hassle of configuring it.  Auto detect notes JRE locations would be very nice.  There should be one place where I set the notes directory during config and all the rest should be handled automatically.

For the dynamic menus - do you mean for built in objects or for custom domain objects in your own viewers? As to UIJob - noted.

Not going to cover that I'm afraid as there's probably no way to hook into the native components.

Hi Sorin, I'm not the right person to ask Symphony questions although they may be plugin related. Try Fabrizio from the team - he is the Master there. He is at fabrizio(dot)marchesano(at)frameweb.it.