I’m looking at the various ways that new external apps can collect, collate and update data from multiple Domino sources (mail, calendar, contacts etc). We are looking to NOT use COM objects, because we want to start without dependency on Notes client (looking ahead to hand-held devices as well).
Other major aspects that we want to deal with are firewalls, authentication, bandwidth and so on. So far, I have come up with a few possibilities…
Java
Websphere
AJAX
Anyone who can help, I will be very grateful for guidance, comments, preferences, documentation etc.
Subject: XML format
If I understand your comments correctly then your requirements are read-only.
Notes data can be surfaced by the Domino server in XML format. The data can be packaged up in a web service response or simply returned by an agent that builds the XML string and sends it back to the calling application with a content type of text/xml.
Simple extractions are straight forward to program using Lotuscript or java agents. You can also look into the ReadViewEntries command that will return the contents of a view in XML or JSON format.
If your requirements are more complex, or you need a lot of different formats for what you are doing, then I have a tool that can speed up the creation of the XML. There is more information at www.enterinfosystems.com. The website is getting a facelift within the next week or two and there will be additional content added.
The consuming application can be anything that can send and receive data using http.
I hope that helps.