My search for a useful way to use Domino as a database back-end for a Ruby front-end has continued and, more specifically, has continued to be difficult.

I gave a shot to the Java CORBA API. Initially, that went well: after grabbing NCSO.jar from my Designer installation, enabling DIIOP on the server, and setting up JRuby, I was able to connect to the server using the host name, canonical user name, and password. Great! However, once I exported my app's Java model classes (modified to use NotesFactory instead of the JSF runtime), I immediately ran into a problem: NotesView.resortView() is not implemented in CORBA. Guh. Theoretically, I could rework the app to use a different view for every index, but it's a canary in the coal mine: no doubt plenty of other new things (FTSearchSorted, for example) have been left unimplemented as well. Plus, this is Domino, so "new" probably refers to anything added after, say, R5.

So that's out, at least for now. That leaves me with the C API. Oh, the C API... so much promise, such a PITA to use. I haven't used C itself much since college, and my experience with the C API is limited to progress bars in the Notes client and, more usefully, my authentication filter for my server. However, I'll be programming in Ruby, not C directly, so it won't be so bad, right?

There are three main ways to work with C libraries in Ruby, I've learned: writing a Ruby module, DL, and FFI. In the first case, I'd basically have to write my API in C and then just use those objects from Ruby. That would be the best performance, but it's just asking for a nightmare. DL is programmed in pure Ruby, but it's so sketchy that just loading the library causes your program to emit a warning telling you you probably shouldn't be using it. FFI, though, is pretty great. Much like DL (or declaring external functions in LotusScript), you declare which functions you want to import, along with their signatures, and then it more or less just works.

That "more or less" is, naturally, tricky. I ran into tremendous trouble just getting it to load up libnotes.so, but most of that was due to using a 64-bit OS and a 32-bit Domino installation. I may make a post about it some time in case anyone else is crazy enough to try the same thing, but the upshot is that I ended up compiling my own 32-bit Ruby environment, which started to work.

Since then, I've been wrestling with the inherent traits and idioms of C (using string buffer arguments to return values instead of just returning a "string", for example) and the specifics of Notes (needing to be pointed to the executable directory as well as needing an ID file, an INI file, and a names.nsf to find the servers). After thrashing around for a while, though, I have it working to the point where I can point the initialization routine to an arbitrary INI file and it can pick up on everything it needs from there (I'm using a password-less ID file - I don't know if you can automate passwords).

Now that I have my foot in the door, it's "just" a matter of learning the entire API. I'm looking forward to that part, though - I've demonstrated that I can open a database on a server and get information out of it, so it seems like I have the right environment. If all goes well, I should be able to create a proper Ruby API for Domino, and a very fast one at that.

For reference, here's the script I've written. Don't expect clean code, reusability, comments, or proper methodology - this file is the result of random mauling during the course of development and just barely works to demonstrate the idea. It DOES demonstrate it, though, and works to ping a (hard-coded) server and get some info about its names database.

test.rb