Lotus Notes C API Development: e.g.: Notes + Firefox Integration

In a perfect world, all your applications interact to each other like a breeze. You are able to combine applications even over different channels like user interfaces or backends. Users do not realize what is done there and it simply works. Well, you may now think this is a nice and wonderful theory - and you are right. Reality is somewhat different and intended solutions encounter a couple of obstacles on they way to become reality. Sometimes you are able to work around such obstacles by a bit of code and nobody realizes that later on. On other challenges this will not work and the solution is more often than rarely a change in the intended solution. This ranges from different behavior of an application over a completely different (read much more complex) design to sometimes stopped projects because they count unrealizable. But also more often than rarely not all options to achieve the intended goal are considered. Using the Lotus C-API is one of such. If it comes to integrating several platforms, several Operating Systems and the interaction between them, C-API is often the only right way to go. It is straight, robust and incredibly fast.

But let's see an example:

You want to integrate your Web-Application with Lotus Notes and with Lotus Domino. At the same time you need to run that Web application on a different platform which is additionally completely separated from your network and for security reasons reachable via Web only. Well, this is easily achievable via normal scripting technologies already packaged into Notes for years. So nothing really difficult. But stop. There is a world beyond the Once-King-of-The-Browsers. And your users are not all necessarily willing to use the Browser made in Redmond. They rather go for Firefox as 40% of all Internet users do in the meantime. So your application shall be usable via Firefox, or - to be technically correct - Gecko-based rendering engines. And here comes a really big obstacle. Mozilla and Firefox do not allow accessing ActiveX via their scripting interface for several reasons. Two of which are: security and cross platform compatibility. By recognizing this challenge many projects would go the way in changing their goal to achive Mozilla/Firefox accessibility. To make it short - such a change will nail the application to Windows and its preinstalled browser only. Nobody else will be able to use that system. But there are efficient and reasonable ways to avoid this. You may already have realized: it is the Lotus C-API. Combining it with the Gecko Plugin API it is possible to create a plugin to Mozilla/Firefox providing an easy and comfortable way to access Lotus Notes from within your web application via JavaScript.

We have created such a plugin, we call it FireNotes. Combined with a solid Javascript-Library and defined function calls, it is incredibly easy to access Lotus Notes from Firefox via Javascript now. Here is an example:

var ret = getCalendarEntries(user, date, getLocalServer());

With that line of code, the variable ret will contain the calendar entries for the given date and user, retrieved from the given server. That server is in this example retrieved from the users setting, which makes it even more dynamic. The ability to package this plugin to an Addon for Firefox and Mozilla, makes it easy to distribute. You just need to install an Addon like the most Firefox users already have done. For the application developer the included JavaScript Library provides a good API to access the functionality of the plugin in an easy and well documented way.