I needed to develop a plug-in for the Lotus Sametime 7.5.1 client. Once again, Google to the rescue. This time, it took a few clicks but I found a great “getting started guide” in four parts.

Part 1 – setting up your machine
Part 2 – building your first plug-in
Part 3 – testing and debugging
Part 4 – deploying using an update site

Sources: Dan Kehn, Senior Software Engineer, IBM & Lawrence Wright, Co-Op student, IBM

The article is very good (especially since it helped me actually get things working as they described!).

Unfortunately, in the end, my plug-in failed. It turns out I needed to use a 1.5.x JVM for my plug-in both for some updates in the JVM and to use a 3rd party library. Here’s the big *GOTCHA* … Sametime 7.5.1 does not support a Sun 1.5.x JVM (or anyone else’s 1.5.x compliant JVM for that matter). As ‘Part 1′ of the article points out, you need to set Eclipse’s “JDK Compliance” to “1.4″ as Sametime uses IBM’s J9 JVM and it is only at the 1.4 level. I didn’t put two and two together at first. Then I got the error: “java.lang.Enum cannot be resolved“ and it all fell into place … or apart … depending on how you look at it.

I don’t think the JVM support is changing anytime soon. <ultimate bummer>

We use Lotus Notes for our business email. I started using the new Lotus Notes 8 starting with their public betas. I really like the integrated email, instant messaging, news reader, and activities. I also had a chance to try out a few other Eclipse plug-ins integrated and extending the total experience.I really liked a lot of what I was able to play with.

Like a lot of software I have evaluated over the past few years, I start out trying every bell and whistle and as time goes by, I spend less and less time on the “neat stuff” and just use the parts that make me more productive. Notes 8 has been no exception.

I really like the integrated feed reader. I was a little frustrating that it was forgetting my read-marks and would show me old stuff as unread. I think some of it is how various feeds report being new/old/updated. Eventually, I stopped using the feed reader. The same became true for the integrated Sametime feature. My favorite feature of the integrated version (nearly identical to the Sametime 7.5.1 release) is the “save chats to mail”. This is great for me since it means I can use Notes full text index to find my correspondence – regardless of it being an email thread or a chat. However, I had stability issues and I didn’t like that chat history didn’t show in the chat window when using the “save chats to mail” was enabled.

In the end, I mostly just use the core Notes 8 features.

Good news for old farts like me – “Notes 8 (Basic)”. It’s the Notes client we love – updated and healthy as ever. If you run the “basic” version of the Notes 8 client, you lose support for plug-ins, and the Integrated Sametime functionality is not as rich as with the new Eclipse based Notes client. Also, “basic” is a Windows-only offer.

I’ll miss enough of the extra functionality in the Eclipse based Notes 8 client to switch back eventually but it is great to have the option and can make the choice for myself.