Are there any default Lotus Domino web services?

Question

Hi,

We're looking into developing an application that can read from and write to Lotus Domino, specifically adding, updating, removing appointments. We've done the same thing for Exchange and GroupWise.

We don't have experience with developing for Lotus Domino yet, but we've been looking at documentation from IBM and other results from Google about their web services. It only seems that you can add web services yourself, written in Java or their own scripting language?

Do they not have a default set of web services, accessible from a WSDL that you can enable, like an 'AddItem' or 'AddAppointment', stuff like that? Services that Exchange / GroupWise offer by default? If they don't, it may not be worth it to write the application for us.

Or is it really only possible to write your own web services.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

There are no out-of-the-box SOAP web services. There is a REST-style interface, mainly for reading data from Notes - you would not be able to create calendar entries. However, it is not a large effort to create something like a web service to create an appointment. There is an introductory article on notes.net:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/web-services2/

Answer 2

IBM is/was working on an atom feed type RESTfull based data access API. IBM had in mind to include this into Domino 8.5.2. However, the feature was dropped in early code drops and has finally been withdrawn.

It looks like IBM decided to go back to the drawing board with the API in light of the new Vulcan strategy. In any case, even if the API would be included in the next point release, it will not include a specific calendar API. Hence one would still need look into the specifics.

Having said all this, FlexDomino.net in partnership with Qkom.de actually developed a web service based Data Access API for Lotus Notes Domino, which will go gold in the next few weeks...

http://www.flexdomino.net/soapgateq

SoapgateQ does not provide calendar specific services either at this time, but on the basis of the currently provided web service operations it should not be too difficult to provide mail, calendar and todo type functionality. In matter of fact we soon going to publish a ToDo application for the iPhone accessing the user's Domino ToDo data.

If you would like more details or a demonstration, please send a mail to Andreas Rosen ([email protected]) or to myself [email protected]

Rgds Matthias