the corner office

It's been ages since I posted anything remotely Notes-related. Blame that on taking a long, long holiday. But exams are looming, and that means one thing: procrastinate. The only way to procrastinate in a guilt-free manner is to do things that feel productive.

So I'm busy reworking my old ndsync app (backups...), but this time around I'm doing it purely with Java agents, which is turning out to be much easier. The java.io.File class plain rocks for file system traversal. I've got some ideas to expand on the general mechanism behind ndsync, so Java's OO-ness will hopefully keep things nicely extensible.

I'm writing everything in Eclipse (of course, he says nonchalantly), and I'm working my way through a developerworks article entitled Using Lotus Notes with Eclipse to manage and run your Java programs, pointed out by Ferdy Christant. Nifty thing - I don't have a Domino server installed right now, and I learned that while the article says you can use the 1.3 JVM from a locally installed server, it seems you can also just rely on the JVM from the Notes client. Just point to your c:\lotus\notes\jvm directory and Bob's yer auntie.

Eclipse and Notes is still a kludge, but less of a kludge than relying solely on Domino Designer to do java stuff. We eagerly await the merging of the Notes client and the Eclipse Deep Voodoo aka ND8. Andrew Pollack has seen the future and he says it rocks.

While I'm on the Notes/Java topic, I mentioned nearly a year ago that the old Lotus Technical Learning Centers had dropped off the face of the web. At the time, I'd sent an email to the IBM webmaster (or someone vaguely fulfilling that role) and I soon got a polite reply saying terribly sorry, nobody seems to know where they are, so you can pretty much take it as a given that they're gone, but feel free to visit our other wonderful content. I was pleasantly surprised that they got back to me and made an effort to investigate what had happened to the LTLCs, even if I wasn't happy to hear that the LTLCs are gone. At this stage, the only public incarnation of the Java LTLC is hidden away in Poland. The Java LTLC gives a good run-down of the different ways to work with local/remote, in-and-out-of-client Notes Java apps. Which is quite topical given how in vogue the Eclipse client is becoming as an alternative IDE.