The Lotus Expeditor Toolkit supports the ability to create and deploy JavaEE web applications to the Lotus Expeditor platform and all of the Expeditor based products, such as Lotus Notes, Lotus Sametime, Lotus Symphony, and Lotus Expeditor. The Developing Web applications section of the community source product documentation provide the step by step details of how to create or convert applications for use on the Lotus Expeditor platform.

This article is not intended to provide step by step directions, rather this article will provide a short overview of the artifacts that make up a Client Services Web Project. The images in this article were created with the Lotus Expeditor 6.2.1 Toolkit and Rational Software Architect 7.5.3, though most of the information presented is common across all releases of the Expeditor Toolkit and Eclipse.

New Project

After you use the Client Services Web Project wizard (File > New > Project > Client Sevices > Client Services Web Project) to create a new CS Web Project you will be prompted to change to the Web Development Perspective. In this perspective the project structure is shown in the Enterprise Explorer view. This view is slightly different from the come common Package Explorer that is used with Java and Plug-in projects. The same project will look slightly different in the two views, but the underlying project is the same.




This view provides access to all of the Java code, Web Content (e.g. HTML, JSPs, CSS), as well as easy access to the web.xml file descriptor. You can also see the Expeditor specific artifacts like the MANIFEST.MF and the plugin.xml files. The layout in this view is meant to show the web application in a structure familiar to the JavaEE programmer. Double clicking these files opens them in the same editor for the file type, just as in the Package Explorer view.


The Package Explorer view provides a more Java or plug-in centric view of the project. All of the artifacts are still available, but the quick access to items such as the web.xml are not available. Double clicking these files opens them in the same editor for the file type, just as in the Enterprise Explorer view.

Project Properties

Right clicking on the project and selecting Properties displays the properties dialog box. The pages and settings shown are specific to the project selected. For Client Services Web Projects there are five primary properties panels of interest: 1) Client Services, 2) Client Services > Web, 3) Project Facets, 4) Targeted Runtimes, and 5) Web Project Settings. The image below highlights these five pages in the four red boxes

Client Services Project Properties Page

Client Services project properties page with Target Definition tab shown

The Client Services properties page has two tabs. The first tab is the Target Definition tab as shown above. This tab allows you to change the target for the project and to set the secondary dependencies for the project.

Client Services Project Properties Page Options Tab

Client Services project properties page with Options tab shown

The Options tab, as seen below, can be used to override default settings for automatic manifest management. For details on the usage of these pages, please see the Lotus Expeditor Toolkit documentation pages for additional details.

Client Services Web Project Properties Page

The Client Services > Web Project properties page allows you to enable incremental JSP compilation. Normally when you launch the target environment from the toolkit or export a web plug-in the toolkit will rebuild all of the JSPs in the project. This settings causes only the JSPs which have been change since the last build to be compiled again. This can product a faster launcher or export, but certain JSP include tags can cause pages to not be recompiled as expected.

Project Facet Properties Page

The Project Facet properties page is not provided by the Expeditor Toolkit, but the toolkit does provide content to the page. The Web bundle facet seen in the image above is used to enable the project to run on the Expeditor target runtimes. This facet is automatically added when you create a Client Services Web project. The facet can also be added to an existing Dynamic Web project to enable that project to run on the supported Expeditor clients. Also seen on this page is the Portlet Bundle facet. This facet is provided by the toolkit and enables the project to support Portlets. This option will only be available in Rational Application Developer or Rational Software Architect. The Rational Portal Tools must be installed into these instances of RAD and RSA.
Though not contributed by the Expeditor Toolkit, other facets on this page will affect the technologies that the project supports. The JavaServer Faces and the Struts facets are often used in conjunction with the Toolkit and support runtime environments.

Target Runtime Properties Page

The target runtime properties page is not provided by the Expeditor Toolkit, but the toolkit does provide content to the page. In order to run a web project on Expeditor, Notes, Sametime, or Symphony from the IDE, you must target the project to the Client Services target runtime. In the example above, the project is targeted to run against the Client Services runtime in addition to WebSphere Application Server 6.1 and WebSphere Application Server 7.0. A new instance of the Client Services runtime can be created on this page.

Web Project Settings Properties Page

The Web Project Settings Properties page is not provided by the Expeditor Toolkit, but the settings on the page are used to manage the plugin.xml and the web.xml file that are part of the project. This properties page should be used to change the content root of the web application being built in the project. Changes to this page are reflected in the appropriate project files when the project is build. The Expeditor Toolkit will automatically update the plugin.xml file when this page is modified.