Borland would like you to buy their commercial C++ Windows visual development environment, C++ Builder. I own this compiler, and I can report that it's an excellent way to build robust Windows applications with a minimum of hard work. To promote their product, Borland decided to give away the compiler for free and only charge you for the GUI development environment on the grounds that "console" or "command line" applications are not that useful. Normally they're right, of course. But in the case of utility software for Lotus Domino, it's possible to write some very useful programs that have a command line interface.

Now you probably noted that I said the Borland compiler worked with the C++ toolkit and didn't mention the C toolkit, which, although it's harder to use, has more functionality. But the even better news is that Lotus has provided a simple way for you to use either C++ or C API function calls within your program, and I'm going to show you an example of that too.

I'll be showing you two simple utilities in this article. One checks a server every few seconds and tells you if the it's up and how long it took to respond. The other implements the Domino remote server console. The code for either of these is very short, so I'm not going to give you some bloated program that you can't make sense of. Don't worry if you've only tackled LotusScript thus far, with this article and a beginners' guide to C++ you can learn how to make your own utilities. For example, you can write your own programs to register new users, archive databases, or any other application you need. There's nothing to stop you from turning your work into Domino server tasks that can be started with a load command on the console. It's all in the Lotus toolkit, and it contains many sample programs written by Lotus to learn from too.

There are some references at the end of the article to help you download the Borland C++ 5.5 compiler and the Lotus C++ 2.1 API Toolkit. For the sake of brevity, I'm going to assume you have reached the stage where you have installed both pieces of software on your Windows machine and you also have a fully functional Lotus Notes R5 client installed (you don't need Designer or Administrator for my examples).

On my machine I have Windows 2000 Professional and Lotus Notes 5.09a. But Windows 98 or NT 4.0 will do just as well and the precise version of the Notes 5 client is not important, though I'm assuming you use a fairly recent one. To use the remote console utility, you'll also need administrator rights on a remote Domino server. If you only have one machine, installing the Domino server on the local machine for testing purposes works just as well.

Compiling the programs
So let's delve into the programs. The code and other information can be found on my company's site http://www.4nf.co.uk/borland so please download the files from there. 4NF respects your right to privacy so they won't be asking you to register or trying to pull any other cunning marketing ploy, though of course if you're interested in commercial products and services, I'm sure someone will be happy to help you.