Best Practices for Deploying Composite Applications 

This article is a set of best practices identified by the composite application team. This is a living and breathing document, it will be updated by contributors as time goes. Please feel free to comment or write an email to the forum for additional items.

NSF Based Composite Applications

Can you have a composite application and an NSF update site be in the same NSF

Yes, however you might want to consider keeping your Eclipse Features in a single update site nsf so it is centrally managed and only referenced by your composites. A key reason you would want to include the update site in the same NSF is the database is deployable as a single file.

If your composite references multiple databases by replica id do they have to be deployed to the clients also

If you reference other databases by replica id the clients need to have bookmarked those databases in order for the references to resolve.

Use the GetProfileField for the Notes URL for your notes components

Notes URL's can change from test to production servers so you are not going to want to have to update or search and replace all of your components in your composite with the new URL's. The best approach is to use the process explained in this post. Use the @GetProfileField mentioned in the com.ibm.notes.ComputedNotesURL preference and make sure you escape the semi-colon "\;" and blank out the "com.ibm.notes.notesurl" preference.

Deploying Eclipse features and plugins with composite applications

Should I deploy features that are shared by more than one composite application within each composite

The short answer is no you shouldn't. If you reference the same feature from multiple composite applications the features will get un-installed whenever one of those applications is un-installed and then it may not get re-installed when the other application is opened. The reason is the composite application subsystem only checks to install features when the CA XML has been changed. So you could essentially break the other applications. The preferred method when installing features and plugins is to use a shared custom installer or deploy the features through a Widget.