Lotus Domino Designer 8 Help - Initial planning information

COMPOSITE APPLICATIONS - DESIGN AND MANAGEMENT

Initial planning information
IBM® Lotus® Notes® supports composite applications, applications which combine components from multiple applications into a single, role-based work environment. Lotus Notes applications can be extended by adding either custom or packaged functions developed on Lotus Expeditor, combined with other technologies, for a composite application.

The following are some common terms that are used when discussing composite applications in Lotus Notes:

Notes application - This was formerly called a "Notes database." A Notes application can have many views, framesets, etc.
NSF component - A Notes database used in a composite application
Component view for NSF components - Defines what is displayed in a palette in the Composite Application Editor. This is represented as one rectangle (one tab) in the Editor user interface (for example, a Notes view, a Notes form )
NSF-based application - An NSF file that stores one or multiple composite application XML files (ca.xml)

Note NSF based composite application support is only available for Lotus Notes applications, accessed from a Notes client, and not for IBM® Lotus® Domino(TM) applications, accessed from a Web browser. To use Domino Web applications, they must be rendered by DAP (Domino Application Portlet) and imbedded in a composite application on WebSphere Portal.

As mentioned. composite applications are composed of multiple components that were independently created and assembled into a single application. This composite application has one or more pages, each of which contains one or more components. The components can support communication interaction, where one or more components are programmed and wired to react to user-initiated action in another component.

A Notes component is a link to a specific view, frameset, document, etc. within a Notes database. The same Notes database can contain multiple components, and those components can be used in multiple composite applications.

Composite applications can be hosted on Domino servers running Lotus Domino 8, or WebSphere Portal servers running WebSphere Portal 6.0. See the WebSphere Portal help documentation for information regarding creating a composite application to run in that environment.

See Also

Basic component design guidelines

Choosing a development environment

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Feedback on Help or Product Usability?

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