Book Image

IBM Lotus Domino: Classic Web Application Development Techniques

By : Richard G Ellis
Book Image

IBM Lotus Domino: Classic Web Application Development Techniques

By: Richard G Ellis

Overview of this book

Domino is an application server that can be used as a standalone web server. As part of the Domino suite, it provides a powerful collaborative platform for the development of customized business applications. It provides enterprise-grade e-mail, messaging, and scheduling capabilities. There are many novice and moderately experienced developers who would like to enhance a Web-enabled Domino application, but to do so they need to learn the fundamentals of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and also how to use those technologies in the context of a Domino application. Information about how to do this is available on the Web, but the sheer volume of that information makes it very difficult for the newbie to get started. Topics and techniques presented in this book provide a comprehensive overview of all major design strategies used to Web-enable traditional Domino applications. Illustrations provide clear working examples of how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can be incorporated into existing applications to improve both look and performance. Early chapters provide suggestions for working with users and for managing your development time and effort. Later chapters focus in detail on forms and pages, views, navigation, agents, security, performance, and troubleshooting. Examples demonstrate clearly how to incorporate HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into Domino designs. By the end of this book you will have learned what you need to know to quickly and competently tackle web application enhancement tasks. Beyond providing a good understanding, this book will continue to serve as a valuable source of ideas and techniques. This book brings together essential classic strategies and techniques used to deploy Domino applications to the Web. Chapters cover all major design elements, with a special emphasis on how to craft these elements to work well with web browsers. Many topics include alternative techniques for solving particular problems. Illustrations and examples can be used where appropriate, or they can serve as jumping off points for your own solutions.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
IBM Lotus Domino: Classic Web Application Development Techniques
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
10
Testing and Debugging

Exploring view options for the Web


Views are important to most Domino applications. They provide the primary means by which documents are located and retrieved. But working with views on the Web is often more complicated or less satisfactory than using views with the Notes client. Several classic view options are available for web applications, all of which have draw-backs and implementation issues.

A specific view can be displayed on the Web in several different ways. So it is helpful to consider view attributes that influence design choices, in particular:

  • View content

  • View structure

  • How a view is translated for the Web

  • How a view looks in a browser

  • Whether or not a view template is used

  • View performance

  • Document hierarchy

In terms of content, a view contains:

  • Data only

  • Data and HTML tags

In terms of structure, views are:

  • Uncategorized

  • Categorized

In terms of the techniques used by Domino to translate views for the Web, there are four basic methods:

  • Domino-generated HTML (the default)

  • Developer-generated...