In this article, it's time to dive deeply into the Domino 8 announcements and in the last article, I'll go further in-depth on each of the key announcements and provide you with more perspective and analysis.

Domino Designer 8
Domino Designer 8 changes are mostly to support composite applications. There's two parts to this: the publishing of the data that the application makes available depending on user activity, and then triggering of actions that the application runs when it gets a trigger from something else.

To make Notes publish an item, such as a view column, you first define the names and types of the interface in these new components. That ends up as a small XML file that other apps can read -- similar to a Web services WSDL (Web Services Description Language) file -- which defines what they are getting.

Then, you define the actual data to be published on one of two ways. You either connect a view column up, which means that the data in that column is published to anything that wants to hear it when that view is opened and a document highlighted. Or you can run a piece of Lotuscript from the view's new OnSelect event, collect together what you need, then with the new NotesPropertyBroker and NotesProperty classes, define and publish it.

Whichever you do, the data items are then just available, as the view is used, to any other composite app that has signed up to receive it and act on it.

Acting on data from another app (Notes or non-Notes) is just as simple: you create a shared action, one that is not displayed, place whatever code you need in it, again using the new classes to get hold of the data. Once you've done that, you then use the new wiring tool to connect the apps together, and you are done.