Little by little, Notes plug-ins change the (Notes) world

Anthony Holmes  4 March 2010 03:11:14 PM

It has been taking some time for all of the benefits of IBM's decision to build Notes 8.5 within an Eclipse framework to become clear. The most obvious benefit was the greatly modernised look and feel of Notes 8.x. But while it might have been helpful to use Eclipse to modernise Notes, it probably wasn't necessary: the old client code could probably have been revamped without using Eclipse.

Eclipse also allowed Notes to be much more extensible. Eclipse comes with a Plug-in architecture. Some of the basic features of Notes 8.x are provided via Plug-ins that IBM writes and ships as a core part of the product. But we also allow Plug-ins developed by others to extend Notes. The obvious place to do this is on the side bar on the right hand side of the screen, where features like the RSS reader and Sametime appear.

But this isn't the only place that programmers can use Plug-ins to extend what Notes can do.

A good example of a Plug-in that gets outside of the Side Bar is the 3D History Thumbnail Viewer that many of you may already have seen:



It displays a full screen History of the pages that you have viewed in Notes. It's much more intuitive than the simple History list that IBM gives you out of the box (a simple drop down list of page titles). Thumbnail images of windows you looked at previously fly past you in a way that makes it very easy to flip back to a page or view you looked at recently.

With previous releases of Notes (and most other closed products) it would have been impossible to radically upgrade the interface of a piece of software without major open heart surgery and a lot of luck. With Notes 8.5 there's an open, supportable way of doing it. People can get these updates pushed out to them, or subscribe via Update sites. If there is a problem with a Plug-in, there's a nice managed way to remove the Plug-in. (A much safer way than than trying to remove the types of backdoor hacking used to deploy any code changes with products that don't have an Eclipse style Plug-in architecture).

I expect we are going to start to see many more Plug-ins that live outside the Sidebar in the future. A lot of imaginative programmers are starting to think outside the box.

• Comments [0]