You can extend the reach and functionality of widgets by developing them in IBM Lotus Widget Factory and running them in both IBM Lotus Mashups and Lotus Notes 8.0 or later. I’ll show how you can deploy the widgets just once, to Lotus Mashups, and enable your Lotus Notes users to add the widgets to the My Widgets panel of their Lotus Notes clients. Because these widgets work on two platforms, they are inherently more valuable to your organization than an application that is limited to a single platform. By enabling cross-communication between your widgets and other applications, either on the same platform or other platforms, you can increase their value even more.

As a preparation for my next articles, in which you’ll learn how to develop search wizards using the Live Text feature in Lotus Notes release 8.0.1 or later, I’ll also show you how to add events that can be triggered on the widget running in Lotus Mashups. Live Text provides a way to convert text from Lotus Notes applications (for example, phone numbers, addresses, and site URLs) into text that you can wire to a widget used by the client. This feature basically creates a hyperlink that is recognized by the listening widget. For example, if you create a widget pointing to the Amazon.com search engine, you can enable live text for any International Standard Book Number (ISBN) in Notes users’ documents. By wiring the widget to the live text, you can provide users with a one-click search that finds information about the books associated with the ISBNs.

In order to follow the widget development example that I present, it helps to have a basic understanding of IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory and the Eclipse/IBM Rational Application Developer development environment. To use the example widget in Lotus Notes, the client must be at release 8.0.1 or later.