Consuming web services in Lotus Notes 6.5

Question

How can we consume any web services in Lotus Notes 6.5. I have seen reference to Soap Connect API. Is it the only way to do it..?

Any example will be a great help..

Thanks..

Answer 1

There is no out of the box solution for LotusScript and WS Consumers in R6. You would need to create your own system to shape the SOAP request, send it to the server and parse the SOAP response.

You are not going to get the benefits from using Web Services in this fashion. The whole point is that you should not have to do this.

If you use the Java route you can use Apache Axis libraries to add consuming functionality.

http://axis.apache.org/axis/

Here is a very old developerworks article on it:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/domino-webservices/

Ultimately though I'd recommend to upgrade to a later version that does support WS consumers in LotusScript. Although be aware that LS suffers in WS due to limitations of the programming language.

Answer 2

What I did in R6 is creating Web based agents using LotusScript which behaved like Web Services. It performed rather good for services that weren't called by too many users at the same time (as far as I remeber...)-

This presentation / sample might be helpful for you: http://www.slideshare.net/billbuchan/jmp206-lotus-domino-web-services-jumpstart#btnNext Full files from Bill's presentation including sample are available for download here: http://www.hadsl.com/HADSL.nsf/Documents/Lotusphere+2008+-+JMP206+-+Web+Services+Bootcamp!OpenDocument

Another helpful link (if you want to use SOAP/Java): http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/tutorials/lswsdom65/lswsdom65-pdf.pdf

Answer 3

If you are on Windows, you can use a COM object in LotusScript to call the webservice. A good one that I used myself is PocketSOAP: http://www.pocketsoap.com/ . It has a lot of features, like support for https, using SOAP headers and sending attachments.

Many of PocketSOAPs features are unavailable or difficult to achieve even in a native R8 web service consumer, so this is an option for higher versions than Lotus Notes 6.5, too.