Design And Application Of Lotus Connections Web Services Client Development Platform

As a business-oriented social networking open platform introduced by IBM, Lotus Connections is a tool for enterprises to acquire, store, share and use knowledge. Lotus Connections provides a set of web services, helping users integrating Lotus Connections into their existing applications easily. In fact, however, existing web services are too flexible and complex, leading to the integration very complicated. With the continuing escalation of the web services, the web service users are required to maintain features of their products, or to re-develop the appropriate modules. So, the Lotus Connections client development platform emerged. Based on the existing service architecture, it packages the existing web services in a unified interface. Now, users’ applications have a new choice to intergrate with Lotus Connections conveniently.The author participates in the design of the platform and the R&D of a platform-based application, and completed the following works written in this paper: Studied in detail of the the Atom Syndication Format, the Atom Publishing Protocol and the Content Management Interoperability Services standard, which are used by the data transmission of services; Used and analyzed the various available web services, made the requirement analysis of the resources provided by five services of "activities","blogs","communities","profiles" and "files" thoroughly; Conceived the design solution, desigined and implemented the basic parts of "activities","blogs","communities","profiles" and "files" five service; Upon the platfrom, developed the Lotus Connections Apache OpenOffice extension, verified the functionality of the platform mentioned in this paper.Currentlly, the platform is still under further development and the OpenOffice extension implemented in this paper has published the early release. The actual effect shows that the client development platform reaches the desired goal. It’s easy to maintain and has good scalability. The platform-based OpenOffice extension has been used by open source community members and got good feedback.