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Pune impressions and: What makes a good composite application?
When you mention Pune (or Poona), India
to people of my age and cultural background immediately this
gentleman springs to mind. I visited
Pune Friday and Saturday to have a look. After previous
experiences I'm tempted to go
there for a retreat. The Ashram however wasn't the primary reason for my
trip to Pune after my speaking engagement at the IBM Software Universe
in Mumbai. Pune is home to a large software lab. This lab is one of the
three labs where the upcoming version 8.0 of Lotus Notes is taking shape.
The team and I had a good session sharing their ideas and experiences and feeding back customer expectations and wishlists. It seems to me that developing software comes with the genuine and instrinct desire to excel in your field (so if something is screws up it likely happens outside the labs).
The Pune lab is the team behind Maureen's masterpiece and I first-hand could play with it. The team is really up to make Domino Designer a good Eclipse citizen. The Designer family of products (Domino Designer, Lotus Designer, Workplace Forms Designer, Rational Application Developer and Portlet Factory) is converging into a single platform and code stream. This will allow you choose the plug-in that suites your needs and skills. It is an exiting prospect and still a long way to go.
A good part of our discussion evolved around composite applications. Notes will be able to expose view and document properties to external callers and will be able to act on external input (with new design elements). Conceptually it is similar to what COM and Notes/FX are doing but implemented with open standards to make Notes and Domino a good SOA citizen. My tip: beef up your knowledge of web services and WSDL in specific. While wizards will do the generation/interpretation for you it makes a lot of sense to understand the base model. The WSDL is used to wire components together.
One very good question popped up: Where to slice and dice existing applications into components. While the how is pretty clear, the where seems to be as much art as it is science. Search and notification components seem to be good candidates. Lookups with more sophisticated interfaces seem suitable too. So what would be your components?
The team and I had a good session sharing their ideas and experiences and feeding back customer expectations and wishlists. It seems to me that developing software comes with the genuine and instrinct desire to excel in your field (so if something is screws up it likely happens outside the labs).
The Pune lab is the team behind Maureen's masterpiece and I first-hand could play with it. The team is really up to make Domino Designer a good Eclipse citizen. The Designer family of products (Domino Designer, Lotus Designer, Workplace Forms Designer, Rational Application Developer and Portlet Factory) is converging into a single platform and code stream. This will allow you choose the plug-in that suites your needs and skills. It is an exiting prospect and still a long way to go.
A good part of our discussion evolved around composite applications. Notes will be able to expose view and document properties to external callers and will be able to act on external input (with new design elements). Conceptually it is similar to what COM and Notes/FX are doing but implemented with open standards to make Notes and Domino a good SOA citizen. My tip: beef up your knowledge of web services and WSDL in specific. While wizards will do the generation/interpretation for you it makes a lot of sense to understand the base model. The WSDL is used to wire components together.
One very good question popped up: Where to slice and dice existing applications into components. While the how is pretty clear, the where seems to be as much art as it is science. Search and notification components seem to be good candidates. Lookups with more sophisticated interfaces seem suitable too. So what would be your components?
