HCL Notes and Domino 9.0 Social Edition Forum - OpenSocial Components in web application

~Dean Umkrother

Dec 22, 2013, 3:45 PM

74 Posts

Fowarded to development <>

OpenSocial/ad,rj

~Samuel Preniskioden

Dec 22, 2013, 8:39 PM

23 Posts

Not Possible Currently

We don't have official support for what you are trying to do right now. I have been doing some work to create a set of OSGi bundles for the Domino server that would allow developers to use the OpenSocial Component on the Domino server to render gadgets in their own web applications but this is not ready for prime time. It is part of the IBM Social Business Toolkit on GitHub, so you can check out the code that is there now if you want https://github.com/OpenNTF/SocialSDK/tree/master/domino/com.ibm.sbt.opensocial.domino. Like I said, this is a work in progress and most definitely will have significant changes made to it. Eventually we would like to get to the point where you just place a script tag in you app and there are a set of JavaScript APIs available for you to use to render gadgets. If you can provide more details on your use case it will certainly help us as we flush out the APIs.

The other sticking point in your use case is authentication. Right now gadgets only support OAuth 1.0 and 2.0 and Domino does not have an OAuth provider. So to be able to access data from Domino, like calendar data, would not be possible today. We would need to put an OAuth provider on Domino or support basic authentication in gadgets first.

~Justin Opresamaretsi

Dec 27, 2013, 7:47 PM

2 Posts

RE: Not Possible Currently

Thanks, I suspected that is the case. I was going to ask about the authentication side too, but decided to keep it to one topic. Is adding OAuth planned?

The vision is to have this new .net app become a dashboard for sales reps. Instead of bouncing between the Notes client for email and calender, we would like to surface them as widgets for summary information (new emails, meetings today) and perhaps when the click on them they can open iNotes. Not sure if they are moving to Exchange yet. There are many other custom Notes applications for both sales and general information (activities, contracts, etc.) where we would like to just show a subset of data and then let the user interact or drill down from there. Making it seamless to the user working in the browser would be ideal. Currently we have data from domino using the access services api to create charts/graphs and links to other data. Some of the links open the notes client to access applications, but this can be awkward for the user. There are too many Notes application to rewrite completely (some are quite complex) in a reasonable amount of time. The short-term path could be to use Domino to create widgets with a subset of functionality to surface in the web application. The long-term would be to rewrite the applications in .net (no small task for some of these), but that may not be needed if the widgets could provide enough functionality for the majority of user; perhaps domino would stay in place.

Part of the challenge is the collision of the two worlds (domino and .net or other open platforms). The scenario you describe of having a set of APIs to call from Javascript to load on page sounds great. It would make it easier for developers who don't understand domino to at least be able to access items, but it still means building any custom widgets needed in domino and understanding the domino architecture (luckily I have been building apps in domino for over 20 years and know the ins and outs).

For now it sounds like we can only pull/push data via the access services and not interact with it directly via a gadget. And we will also need to deal with dual logins either with the Notes client or Domino web access.

Thank you for the update and I look forward to being able to blend this all together more easily in the future.