COMPOSITE APPLICATIONS - DESIGN AND MANAGEMENT


Composite applications in IBM Lotus Domino Designer
Composite applications are a key element in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and contextual collaboration strategy. The ability to create and edit composite applications lets you easily integrate different types of components and technologies.

By creating composite applications, you can loosely couple IBM® Lotus® Notes applications NSF components and Eclipse components in context as part of one user experience. Components within a composite application can be wired to together so a user-initiated action in one component can trigger an action in another component.

This functionality is supported by the use of properties, actions, and the property broker. The IBM® WebSphere Portal composition application model and property broker model is now available to the Notes rich client. IBM® Lotus® Domino(TM) Designer has been extended to leverage the property broker experience in NSF components, thereby providing a more productive user experience within the Notes rich client. You can define composite applications using the Composite Application Editor in the Notes rich client or the WebSphere Portal Application Template Editor in the browser, both of which are described in this section of the documentation.

A composite application is end user facing where multiple components that were independently created are assembled into a single context. A composite application can have one or multiple pages, each page containing one or more components. The single context provided by the composite application means you no longer need to switch windows or to various applications to work with information from disparate applications or systems.

Composite applications can be hosted on either IBM® Lotus® Domino(TM) or WebSphere Portal servers or as a local NSF. You can define NSF-based composite applications using the Composite Application Editor which allows the wiring and connecting of various components within a composite application.

The following illustrates some important points regarding composite applications in Lotus® Notes:


Distribution of development responsibilities

Development responsibilities for building composite applications can be distributed across several types of application development and administration team members. The process does not have to be restricted to the highly skilled component developer. The roles in composite application development can include the following:


Note A local Eclipse update site may also be used for administration. Refer to the topic "Building Eclipse components" for more information.

Before you begin working with composite applications

This documentation assumes you are familiar with creating new Notes databases, modifying Notes views, creating simple Notes forms and using the Programmer's pane to input Notes formulas and LotusScript.

In addition to satisfying the system prerequisites for a Lotus Notes, be sure that you (or your administrator) have installed the following so that you can develop and assemble composite applications:


Note Domino Designer is not currently supported on Linux®.

Before working with composite applications, you may wish to read through this composite applications documentation to gain a sense of supported functionality and application intent.

See Also