Friday, November 24, 2006

Using Java in Lotus

I haven't been updating this site as often as I want too but work have been keeping me really busy.
My friend was asking why should he (Domino Developer) learn up Java? Basically for Lotus Notes application, it is quite sufficient to keep to Lotus Script and Formula. There are lots of advise why should we learn up Java but I'm not going to go into that here. I give let him know that the skill may come useful sometime even in Lotus Notes application. It would be good to branch out a little too.

So for the Lotus Notes application example, I gave him the link to a post I had sometime back in my earlier blog. The example show how you can use a Java image library to get property out of attached image files. I couldn't find any way of doing it in LotusScript (drop me a line if you know of a way). Check out the example here. At least he agreed that there are some use of Java in Lotus Notes application development.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

There are more Java APIs out there, which can become usefull or even necessary:
- There are some databases with really good JDBC drivers, which one could prefer to ODBC drivers.
- There are Java APIs for electronic archives, such as IBM ContentManager.
- networking (TCP/IP, FTP etc.)
- PDF creation
- complex computations and arithmetics
- etc.
You can spare alot of work using these, but you can do it with Java (or at least LC2J) only.

William Beh said...

@Thomas. PDF creation is one that is very useful. Quite a few free Java API to generate PDF.

Anonymous said...

Would agree with the above - I have used Java for networking/http communication then LS2J to wrapper this allowing other developers to continue using LS with no need to touch the Java.

And yes, there is definitely a larger library of code out there for Java, particularly in the open source community.

But it is worth keeping in mind that you should use it when its the right tool for the job.