The second day of Lotusphere began with OpenSocial integration to generate embedded experiences. With Lotus Domino 8.5.4 Social Edition, embedded experiences are going to be a significant addition to the Domino developer’s toolkit through the second half of 2012. With OpenSocial and embedded experiences developers can add functionality into the mails they send. Whereas in the past an email from an application has had some text and a link to perform an action, embedded experiences allow developers to offer users the ability to perform those actions in context without leaving their inbox. That is, if the inbox is social-enabled, as it will be in Domino 8.5.4 Social Edition. If XPages offers Web 2.0, Domino 8.5.4 Social Edition offers Mail 2.0. And users of social software will already be familiar with the functionality.
Understandably security is important to Domino administrators, but by integrating using widgets and policies, it gives a standard framework for providing the kind of security with OpenSocial that we have come to expect from everything else in Domino. And the security when storing OAuth credentials are also what we have come to expect from Domino.
Yes, it will be cool and interesting, but embedded experiences may not work for all situations. One of the strengths of Notes is the ability to work offline. But an embedded experience to a server-based application isn’t going to work offline. Equally, not all mail clients will support embedded experiences straight away. So developers will need to think about use cases and provide alternative functionality in the text. But the work is already being done by IBM to empower Domino developers and ensure that, if the container does not support embedded experiences or works offline, it’s handled gracefully.
Currently there’s a lot of XML, Client-Side JavaScript and HTML involved in generating the embedded experience – it’s not a case of a few extra lines of code to your mail agent / XAgent. But the good news is that the skills built in XPages development will be leveraged for building embedded experiences.
Upgrade Pack 1 has also been a focus of Lotusphere 2012 and there have been a number of sessions about the Extension Library. There is a lot of great functionality, and hopefully the book will not be too much longer.
On a separate note, I was speaking to the developers about rich text editing on mobile devices, because I found out at the end of last year that the XPages Forum now allows full editing functionality on an iPad. We eventually found out that it’s using the Dojo editor rather than the CK Editor, but irrespective of this, it’s a change in iOS 5 support that allows both rich text editors to work on iPad and iPhone. This is great news for XPages developers, especially those using the mobile controls.
