There is nothing worse then leaving the
‘Ask the Developers’ session at Lotusphere and then thinking of a question
that you would have loved to have asked so I’m going to ask it here in
the hope that somebody might see it.
There was a lot of sessions on XPages
at Lotusphere this year, a lot of the development sessions concentrated
on XPages development for the web browser but there are still a lot of
people who develop for the Lotus Notes client or who like to create a good
client interface for applications that can be accessed via the web or the
Notes client. When version 8 was originally released it introduced a new
concept for the Notes Client called ‘Java Views’ which was added to a couple
of the standard templates like the mailfile and personal addressbook.
These new Java Views looked really great
but the ability for the non-IBM application developer to create these Java
Views was hidden from us but it was soon discovered that you could apply
the java views to your own applications by adding in a notes.ini variable
to expose some extra options in the Domino Designer client.
However if you d reuse the Java View
framework in your own applications you end up with the default switcher
in the upper right corner of the navigator. While it’s handy for your mailfile
it serves no purpose in custom applications. Starting in 8.5 you can now
disable the default switcher thanks to these
instructions from Steve Castledine but what I’d love is a way
to create your own switcher options.
In Blogsphere and in many other applications
that I have created I like to ‘hide’ the configuration and logging navigators
behind the switcher as it creates a cleaner interface for the standard
user who does not need to see these areas of the application on a regular
basis. Using Java Views this is not possible however if I could program
the default switcher to my own needs then I’d be able to do it.
So my question for the ‘Ask the Developers’
session should have been, when will you release more information about
Java Views and allow us the ability to customize all aspects of Java Views
including the default switcher.
Dec's Dom Blog 
In one of the xpages sessions Maureen showed xpages in the notes client. This was very much a work in progress and looked a lot like an web xpage simply rendered in the client. However she did mention that plan was to have the view component use java views when rendering xpages to the client. My take away from this was that they are keen to get xpages in the client and that enhancement to the client side is likely to happen via that route.
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In one of the xpages sessions Maureen showed xpages in the notes client. This was very much a work in progress and looked a lot like an web xpage simply rendered in the client. However she did mention that plan was to have the view component use java views when rendering xpages to the client. My take away from this was that they are keen to get xpages in the client and that enhancement to the client side is likely to happen via that route.
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Hey Dec, I’ve been meaning to discuss Blogsphere’s current switching behavior so I’m glad you brought it up. Specifically, I think we should change the behavior such that, like in the Mail file when switching to cal/tasks, or in SuperNTF when switching to the Admin panel, we open a whole new frameset in its own window/tab, instead of replacing the contents of the current frameset/tab. This makes it much easier to move back and forth between the two, and also has a nice side effect, in SuperNTF anyway, of handling the “Restore as last viewed by user” launch property cleanly. So for example, if your last “Admin” frameset view was the error log, it will open next to that view but still open whatever “user” view was last opened in the “Main” frameset.Not sure how Java views would figure into this, but thought I’d throw it out there.
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Yes we are looking at making the switcher extensible in an upcoming release where you can add your own actions to it.
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