The Basic Xots Tasklet in the Blog

Sat Sep 06 09:28:25 EDT 2014

Tags: blog xots

Continuing in my two-day spat of blog posts shamelessly containing "blog" in the title, I figured I'd mention how I'm using Xots for new-comment notifications.

If you're not familiar with it, Xots is a recent addition to the OpenNTF Domino API (added in the recently-released M5 RC1 build), intended to replace both agents and DOTS. There's still more work to be done on the scheduling portion, but Xots is perfectly capable of running manually-created tasks in a similar manner to Threads and Jobs as well as, to a slightly-lesser extent, responding to custom-named events.

The latter is the way I'm using it. I created a Tasklet class and told it to be triggered when something sends an event named "newBlogComment". The code therein is pretty simple: there's a handleEvent method that is fired when an event with that name is fired (by any app on the server, but it's just the one currently), and that code is pretty bog-standard Domino emailing code. The trigger happens in the Comment model class, and it's just a basic one-line affair.

Now, admittedly, in order to get the Xots task working, I had to write an agent to specifically name the class in the $Xots field of the icon note, but that is something that will be handled by a Designer plugin eventually - it's just the price of being an early adopter for now.

So is this a big, world-changing paradigm shift? Not in this instance, but it demonstrates that it's pretty straightforward to start writing multi-threaded and decoupled code using Xots, including custom events. Over time, it will expand to cover scheduled tasks and API-triggered database events ("document saved", etc.). It's pretty cool stuff.

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