Introduction

When I worked at Research In Motion and after, I’ve presented at Lotusphere and the View Domino Developer Conference on how to access Domino applications from BlackBerry devices.

Of course, the lead approach was to use the browser to access mobile friendly Domino applications. It’s not a very exciting demo though – you take a domino database and scrunch it down so it fits the smaller screen and uses rich media sparingly.

The other option I discussed was to create Web Services in a Domino application then use Research In Motion’s MDS Runtime technology to access the operations exposed by these services. It was a truly amazing demonstration to illustrate the web service then build a rich (non-browser) BlackBerry application that talked to it in minutes. With Research In Motion’s recent announcement of the end of life of MDS Runtime and associated development tools – developers need another option for building a (non-browser) rich client application that talks to web services. I’m sure there’s a way to do it from a BlackBerry Widget but I still haven’t had a chance to play with that technology yet.  The only other option is to consume the Web Service from a Java application and for my presentation this year at the View Domino Developer conference I built a Java version of the application I’d been demonstration for years using MDS Runtime.

A few weeks ago I posted here that I was going to write some articles about how to build that application. From the responses I received, it seems that there are a lot of you who are interested in the information, so here we go…

I’m going to split this topic into three parts:

• Part 1: (this article) How to build the Domino Web Service used in the sample application
• Part 2: How to create the Web Service Stub called by the Java application
• Part 3: How to build the Java application (for BlackBerry of course) that talks to the service

Attachments:

File	Description	File size
DomDirLookupWS.nsf	Domino Directory Lookup Web Service Source Code (in a Notes Database).	320 Kb
Domino Web Service Part 1.pdf	This article in a cleaner PDF format than what the site will allow.	697 Kb

On the RIM Developer Blog they just announced an  upcomming webinar called 'BlackBerry Developers Webinar: Web Development and Toolkits' Looks interesting; you can check it out here.

I started playing with Google Docs the other day and I thought I'd share a little of my experience. I've been maintaining a long list of topics I want to write about here and it was filling up my task on my BlackBerry and desktop mail client. All of a sudden I had more personal tasks than work tasks and that's not good. I could maintain them in a word doc but then having access to the list from multiple places would be problematic. I use Second Copy to synchronize personal files between my laptop and desktop (which I'll write about in a few weeks), but I don't have many and it wasn't worth the effort to setup a new profile for just this one file.

I thought I'd give Docs a try to see how it would work for me and I found it to be a really good fit. I quickly logged in and created a list of all of my topics. The editor has all of the features I need and I can work locally then save the document in the cloud when I'm on the network. I can then access (and update) the file from my personal desktop at home and my laptop while I'm on the road.  I lose the ability to have the list on my BlackBerry (I haven't accessed Docs from my device yet, I'm assuming it won't work - no Gears client until Device Software 5.0) but that's not important to me since the only time I use the BlackBerry for this is to quickly add a new item to the list which only seems to happen on airplanes. I'll just add the topic to my tasks list then copy it over to the document when I can. No biggie.

I am seeing one interesting and annoying issue with the tool. I'm an expert Word user (sorry to brag) and use Headings to organize the structure of my documents and when you create a heading then enter a carriage return to begin the next line - for some bizarre reason Docs treats the heading and the first word that follows as the same word - and underlines it as a spelling error.

Printing is an interesting experience - when you print, Docs makes a PDF of the file on the fly and sends it to the browser. The browser opens Adobe Acrobat and lets you print, email, even mark-up the document. Pretty cool and a smooth feature.

My wife is going to help a friend create a resume tonight. I suggested Docs for this since my wife could help her create it then it would be accessible to both my wife and her friend. They can both work on it without needing to be in the same location. If it needs tweaking, my wife can make the updates and her friend could read it, email it or print it no matter where she is.

All in all, a good tool for me.

A few weeks back the press announced a new BlackBerry site managed by RIM called myblackberry.com. I quickly went online to see what it was and was frustrated for several weeks by its unavailability. Last week the pundits started announcing that the site was live so I went out again to try to access the site. Here's what I got:

I decided to try again today and was able to access then register with the site. Funny thing happened when I registered, it allowed me (actually required me) to set my own security question, but for some bizarre reason forced a minimum length for my answer. See below:

I dutifully entered my question and the answer but found that it was too short. What was I to do? I coudn't change my answer to fit the minimum length required by the form. Rediculous. I had to pick a different question to use.

I have to admit that I hate it when web developers force a requirement for an input field but don't tell me about it until after I populate the field wth the value I want to use. How much simpler would it be to tell me in advance what the requirements are so I could assess my security question and associated answer before hitting the submit button? I would have known immediately that my 'answer' was too short and selected a different question. Of course, after returning to the form you see above, certain of the fields I'd populated were blanked out, so I had to repopulate other portions of the form as well. Not a very helpful design.