The recommended IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for looking at plugins is Eclipse. You can open them in Domino Designer, but I prefer to keep my development environment clean – I have enough Notes Applications and On Disk Projects there, without confusing the matter further. Plus, if you’re looking to debug them, Eclipse is a better place from which to do that.
Eclipse can be installed on Windows, Linux or MacOS. Its versions are based on alphabetical names, so the latest is Luna, the previous was Kepler, and before that Juno. If you go to the downloads page, Eclipse comes in a number of flavours which, as far as I can tell, means that the zip file you download already includes plugins appropriate for that kind of development. The one I go for is Eclipse for RCP and RAP Developers. (There is a web-based IDE, Orion, but I’ve not tried that.)
The download is a zip file that you can unzip to an appropriate file location you wish. The good news is that, unlike Domino Designer, multiple versions of Eclipse can be installed on the same machine. The workspace is held outside of the Eclipse installation itself, although Eclipse may upgrade the workspace if you open it with a newer version of Eclipse. (I had this when moving from Kepler to Luna.)
You can now launch Eclipse and you will have a working environment.The good news is that through years of working with Domino Designer on Eclipse, ever since 8.5.0, most Domino developers will already be familiar with much of Eclipse – working sets, search, different perspectives, the Package Explorer.
However, it is not configured yet to have access to all the relevant plugins and jar files to compile Domino plugins or build update sites for Domino.
Contents
- An Introduction
- Installing the IDE (Eclipse)
- Configuring for Domino
