Here's something you might not see everyday: An XPage UI rocking an iPhone UX on a Blackberry:

My Build Project for my mobile development session, Creating mobile device apps for Lotus Notes and Domino applications, is a simple one: creating an XPage-based HTTP Request Proxy for a Personal Address Book, with absolutely no modifications to the target NotesDatabase design.

Hopefully I see you there, May 11th-15th in Boston!

Lotus Notes Domino, Blackberry, WAP, and forgetting your portfolio (and Ego)!

I found myself in a pretty interesting situation today: I had a customer that had a need that I could address with a very low-tech solution. And it got me wondering if we don't put too much on building this monolithic solution that leverages the greatest cutting edge technology to date and something that's completely unique and amazing... just to sorta pad our own egos -- me being a huge offender of that very thing! I will often take a look at a situation and say, "Hmm, I know how everyone else would handle it; how should I take a look at it?".

And for better or worse, I talk about these really cool, unconventional ways of addressing an issue.

Well, I try not to do that for customers and in particular I didn't this time around. Now, the problem (if you will) or the request was simple: they had a Lotus Notes Client-based application that they wanted to be able to take to the mobile device. Now, the mobile device in question was a Blackberry. They run their own BES server; it's all in-house. They have people in the field that access their backend environment with Blackberries.

Everything was setup, so all I had to do was take the data out of the NotesDatabase and put it into a format that would work on the Blackberry.

I could use direct HTTP Requests... so I went that route.

(Click thru for more...)

I was contacted by Keith the other day asking me for a downloadable example from my WML-enabling a Personal Address Book - It's in the cards.... article.

Instead of going the multi-Design Element route (as the original article called for a View Design Element and a Form Design Element), I thought that I would take a second to simplify the approach and instead deliver the same functionality with a single Agent Design Element.

The Agent - named mobile - can be added to any Lotus Notes Personal Address Book Template-based NotesDatabase, have that NotesDatabase setup with an appropriately configured Access Control List, put in on a Domino HTTP-enabled Server, and simply point your mobile devices to NotesDatabase/mobile.

The Agent itself is very simple - by design - and can allow for customization via tweaking to meet the needs of the particular customer:

Sub Initialize

 Dim s As New NotesSession
 Dim db As NotesDatabase
 Dim col As NotesDocumentCollection
 Dim doc As NotesDocument
 Dim markup_options As String
 Dim markup_cards As String
 
 Set db = s.CurrentDatabase
 Set col = db.AllDocuments
 Call col.FTSearch(|[form] = "Person"|, 0)
 
 Print |Content-type: text/vnd.wap.wml|
 
 If (col.Count > 0) Then
  
  Set doc = col.GetFirstDocument
  
  Do Until (doc Is Nothing)
   markup_options = markup_options + |<option value="| + Join(doc.GetItemValue("fullname"), "") + |"><onevent type="onpick"><go href="#card_| + Cstr(doc.UniversalID) + |" /></onevent>| + Join(doc.GetItemValue("fullname"), "") + |</option>|
   markup_cards = markup_cards + |<card id="card_| + Cstr(doc.UniversalID) + |" title="Contact Info"><p><b>| + Join(doc.GetItemValue("fullname"), "") + |</b><br />| + Join(doc.GetItemValue("mailaddress"), "") + |<br />| + Join(doc.GetItemValue("officephonenumber"), "") + |</p></card>|
     Set doc = col.GetNextDocument(doc)
  Loop
  
  Print |<?xml version="1.0"?><!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD WML 1.1//EN" "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml_1.1.xml">|
  Print |<wml><card id="card1" title="| + Cstr(db.Title) + |"><p><select name="name">| + markup_options + |</select></p></card>| + markup_cards + |</wml>|
  
 Else
  
  Print |<?xml version="1.0"?><!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD WML 1.1//EN" "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml_1.1.xml">|
  Print |<wml><card id="card1" title="| + Cstr(db.Title) + |"><p><b>Unable to load Contacts</b></p><p>There appears to be an issue with this address book. Please contact support.</p></card></wml>|
  
 End If
 
End Sub

Pretty simple stuff here, which renders the following WML markup:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD WML 1.1//EN" "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml_1.1.xml">
<wml>

<card id="card1" title="Example WAP NAB">
<p>
<option value="Chris Toohey">
<onevent type="onpick">
<go href="#card_3CEDB7D07E5327D98525760200117ECA" />
</onevent>Chris Toohey</option>
</select>
</p>
</card>

<card id="card_3CEDB7D07E5327D98525760200117ECA" title="Contact Info">
<p>
<b>Chris Toohey</b><br />
ctoohey@dominoguru.com<br />
610.417.1700</p>
</card>

</wml>

So feel free to take the above LotusScript-based Agent Design Element code and use it to add a mobile device WAP UI to any Group Address Books and such that you might have lying around. Also, feel free to point your mobile device WAP-friendly browser to check-out the online demo that I've setup.

(Note: I wrote this in an Agent and leveraged things like FTSearch from within the mobile Agent. I do this so you can easily pinpoint what's going on and apply any required modifications.)

Now, for a killer solution: combine this with Showtime and deliver via Channel Push - for example - as many icon-laden WAP-enabled Personal Address Books that your customer teams require.

So, to review:

To implement this solution, you can simply create a new Agent Design Element named mobile, past in my code, and point any WAP-friendly mobile device to /mobile.

One of the latest projects that I'm working on is something that I absolutely need: a simple yet effective Project Management and Tasking application.

I've decided to try to make this process as public as possible in an effort to drive away all of my readership to show you an example of ground-up development for new projects.

For example, I've posted the following two snapshots of my notepad entries based on customer meetings that I've had to gather requirements which establish a phase 1 and phase 2 run of napkin development for said project (shown respectively):

Yeah... you really can't see much. But it's not the particular content that I really wanted to share but the overall process.

Thankfully, the customer is all for my sharing this project with the overall community (minus their specific extended-functionality requests, of course), and provided I can get this completed in a timely manner I'll coordinate with the OpenNTF groups and get this online for a download.

I plan on starting development on this project after this weekend, where I'm wrapping up one post-due project and my Domino Java Ajax Proxy wiki article (and example application download)... so stay tuned!

... ok, I'll share a few basic features and functionality that I'm looking to add:

I want to create a fluid multi-client UX, which means using the UI that I played around with a few weeks back to mirror the Facebook UX in a Lotus Notes Client application. That being said, I'm writing this for the Lotus Notes Client, Wap/Mobile browser clients, and eventually a Web Browser client. Silly order you may say, but the fat client and mobile clients were the big requirements for this one... as the Web Browser client is really something that's a nice to have.

As for the functionality in the application itself, each Project will act as a single NotesDocument, which each Task a Response NotesDocument. A Task can have a dependant Task, which will allow you to properly weigh assignee workload across all projects as well as pinpoint potential delivery delays.

Each Task will also act as a milestone within the overall Project, so each Task is weighted against an overall 100% completion rate with completed milestone percentages rolling up to the Parent Project NotesDocument. ... hopefully that makes sense!

So anything else that you'd like to see in this application? Time provided, I'd love to get some click-to-export functionality that will allow you to take the content into Excel, Symphony, Open Office, or even Microsoft Project.

I was once asked why I would created a little application that would do nothing more than what could be done with a simple SmartIcon. When I created SOTU - my Remote Console Command utility, it's v0.1 release was a simple utility that - yes - was an extended version of what you could do with a simple SmartIcon. v0.2 gave you the option to configure a simple Sidebar Widget, and allow you to issue Remote Console Commands to your Domino servers with even greater ease. With SOTU v0.3, you won't even have to fire up your laptop!

Simply point your mobile device's WAP browser to sotu.nsf/mobile, and you will be presented with a simple WAP-enabled Form:

From here, you can select the Server and enter a console command. Click the Issue Command button, which submits the request via POST to a simple Domino Agent which uses the SOTU Script Library and issues the remote console command.

Once properly executed, the browser is redirected to sotu.nsf/mobile, and can quickly see the response (if any) from the Remote Console Command via a pseudo-embedded View at the bottom of the mobile Form.

Quick Tip: For you Blackberry users, you can use Showtime to create a simple Channel Push icon for your Admin team and quickly deploy this application just in time for Lotusphere!

Here's a quick icon set that I used for my team - both a standard and an updated icon, shown respectively:

See how I tie things in (eventually)?!

Also, v0.3 has no error handling in the mobile.engine which handles the request... and for good reason. If you get an Agent Done response form the Agent... then something's broken, and it's more than likely a permissions issue with the Remote Console security stuff (which can be changed on the Server Document). The Remote Console Command will be issued by the server, so make sure you have everything from a security side setup or you'll likely see something like this on the server console/log: