WHAT'S NEW IN DOMINO DESIGNER 8?

Programming
A major new enhancement in Lotus Notes Release 8 is the support for composite applications, a key element within IBM's service oriented architecture (SOA) and contextual collaboration strategy. By creating composite applications, you can loosely couple IBM® Lotus® Notes applications NSF components, Eclipse components, and Lotus Component Designer components in context as part of one user experience. Two new Notes classes were created to allow this coupling, NotesProperty and NotesPropertyBroker. Additionally, the new event OnSelect was added to the NotesUIView class to allow the selecting of documents within one component to affect the information displayed within the other components.

Building on the existing concept of script libraries, new with Release 8, Domino Web services can be made available to applications through Web service enabled script libraries. Each Web service enabled LotusScript or Java script library contains a single Web service. Once a Web service enabled script library is created, it can be used in many different contexts, such as agents and event handling code, within Domino applications. Also known as Web service consumers, they let an agent or other code call Web services hosted elsewhere by Using the Web service consumer script library. A Web service consumer does not use a Web Service design element, which is still used only for publishing.

Two new classes in Release 8, NotesDirectory and NotesDirectoryNavigator, allow you to perform Lookups and navigate the database files of a server programmatically from within LotusScript. Many new methods and properties have also been added, to make it easier to work with document and view entry collections.

The following documentation is new in the Programming section of online help.

Programming overview and user interface

Web service enabled script libraries or Web service consumers
Web services can be made available to applications through Web service enabled script libraries, known as Web service consumers, each of which calls a single Web service hosted elsewhere. Once created, a Web service enabled script library can be used in many different contexts within Domino applications.

Programming Domino for Web applications

Web services in Domino Designer
Web services can be made available to applications through Web service enabled script libraries. The "Warn if the WSDL interface is modified" option is automatically selected when an Import WSDL action is performed. The option "Include operation name in SOAP action" is enabled by default.

Previewing Web services
Web services can now be previewed locally before they are released, in the same way that forms and views can be previewed locally.

RSS feeds
A new database template, rss_generator.ntf, contains a collection of agents and script libraries designed to produce RSS feeds for views in Domino databases

Domino Web logs (blogs)
A new Domino blog template, dominoblog.ntf, can be used to create personal Web logs with Notes. Content can be added using either Lotus Notes or a Web browser.

Managing blog HTML templates
HTML templates for blogs control how the blog looks and feels. The Page, Item, Block, and Web client templates combine HTML with special system tags to display the end result in a browser.

LotusScript language

Lotus Domino Designer 8 adds the following:


Formula language

Lotus Domino Designer 8 adds the following:


LotusScript/COM/OLE classes

Lotus Domino Designer 8 adds the following:


Java/CORBA classes

Lotus Domino Designer 8 adds the following:


URL commands for Web applications

ReadViewEntries
New optional arguments for ReadViewEntries were added that cause the last document in the view to be the last entry returned, format the output in JavaScript Object Notation, allow a startkey to be treated as a numerical value, and navigate the rows of a view in reverse.

Table of CGI variable names
The new CGI variable Request_Content_nnn allows HTTP POST requests to exceed 64K of data.