By Tony Patton
Lotus Notes/Domino Release 5.0 is expected to ship later this year. This release will introduce numerous changes to the to the development environment. These changes include the numerically challenged LotusScript 4.0 and new classes that correspond with new features in the environment.
This first article in my Programming Power series gives a broad overview of the new features in the Notes/Domino 5.0 development environment. Subsequent installments will cover the individual features in greater detail.
Notes IDE (Integrated Development Environment)
In Notes Release 4.x, the browser checkbox allowed you to browse the nuances of the LotusScript language, including all Notes and OLE classes. This has been replaced in Release 5.x with a new window on the left side of the design pane. This new window, shown in Figure A, includes two tabs: ObjectView and InfoView. ObjectView shows all methods and properties for the currently selected (highlighted) object. The InfoView tab mimics the functionality provided by the browser checkbox in previous versions.
FIGURE A
Here's a preview of the nicely improved Notes/Domino 5.0 IDE user interface. (click for larger image)
Printing
Printing scripts in Release 4.x was crude. You had to copy and paste or export the contents of a script to another application for printing. In Release 5.0, scripts can now be printed directly from the development environment. Also, a row and column number in the lower right corner of the script pane now represents the current position of the cursor within a script.
Performance improvements
Lotus has also promised performance enhancements in version 5.0. These include script libraries loading faster and the removal of the 64 KB limit of script and array size (it has been raised to 2 GB). In addition, support for multi-threaded scripts has been added.
Visual Basic similarities
Also, the Visual Basic similarity of LotusScript has evolved even more by adding two new variable types: byte and object. The byte type will hold an Integer from 0 to 255 and an Object can hold any reference to an object including OLE objects.
New classes
Release 5.0 has introduced numerous new elements to the Notesand Domino landscape.
NotesOutline
This class is used to work with the new outline design element. The outline includes all elements in a Notes database. This can include documents, views, and HTML pages to name a few. The developer sets the appearance of the outline.
NotesOutlineEntry
The NotesOutlineEntry class facilitates accessing elements in a Notes outline. The outline can be traversed just like a view or document collection, as shown in Figure B.