You can build IBM® Lotus® Notes® NSF components that use inter-component communication supported by the new property broker functionality of Lotus Notes 8 client. Property broker has been available in IBM® WebSphere Portal and is now available for use in IBM® Lotus Notes 8, in both NSF-based composite applications on the IBM® Lotus® Domino(TM) server and in composite applications hosted on WebSphere Portal server.

Note Components used in composite applications are meant to be designed with the idea of reuse in mind.

The following steps outline a typical process for creating new composite applications to be used by Lotus Notes 8:

• Step 1 -- Design your components. For detailed information on how to design your Notes-based NSF components, refer to the Application Design section of the IBM® Lotus® Domino(TM) Designer 8 Help. For detailed information on how to design your Eclipse-based components, refer to the Lotus Expeditor Toolkit or Eclipse help.
• Step 2 -- Build your components. Components can be Eclipse components or Notes NSF components. Components can be built or modified to support inter-component communication through the property broker feature. You can use Domino Designer 8 to create and modify Notes components and the Lotus Expeditor Toolkit IDE or Rational Application Developer to create and modify Eclipse components. In Domino Designer, the Property Broker Editor feature generates the necessary WSDL files required for inter-component communication via the property broker.
  • Extra procedure for WebSphere Portal only -- Generate portlets to represent your Eclipse and Notes NSF components and deploy the generated portlets to WebSphere Portal. An NSF component generator feature is supplied with the Composite Application Editor feature to automatically generate portlets from Notes and Eclipse components. You then use the WebSphere Portal administration console or an xmlaccess script to deploy the portlets to WebSphere Portal. The portlets generated in this procedure are only placeholder portlets to let the composite application be defined on Portal. They do not provide a portlet for running the Notes component on Portal.
  Note Refer to the documentation available from the Composite Application Editor for more details on using the NSF component generator feature.
• Step 3 -- Assemble and wire the composite application using the Composite Application Editor or the Portal Application Template Editor. As stated earlier, the process can be can be distributed across several types of application development and administration team members. Assembly and wiring may also be performed by LOB (line of business) users with appropriate permission.
• Step 4 -- Deploy your composite application.

The process can be can be distributed across application development and administration team members. Assembly and wiring may also be performed by LOB (line of business) users with appropriate permission.

See Also

Designing your application components
Building your components
Generating portlets and deploying to Websphere Portal (for WebSphere Portal only)
Assembling and wiring your composite application
Deploying and testing your composite application

Glossary