So, I came back from Dublin all enthused about XPages and I’ve spent the last few days starting to port IdeaJam across to be a pure XPages app. This is my progress so far:
Notice the difference… no? Well that’s the point really. But so far, what took me several weeks has taken two days to get working to a reasonable level in XPages. The bits I’ve done so far are the voting, views that know whether you’ve voted on an idea and view paging. Over the next few weeks I’ll hopefully be posting some tips and tricks that I am learning as I go. At the moment I’m writing an add-on to OpenLog that will allow logging of server side JavaScript and will hand that code on to Julian for posting with the next version of OpenLog.
There is no way that you could claim XPages is feature complete, I’ve managed to crash Designer a few times, there are focus issues with the different windows in the Eclipse Designer client, and the documentation needs to be a *lot* better. But I have spent precisely four days with XPages and I’m producing pages that look as good as a classic Domino web page that required the previous 13 years of experience with Notes and Domino for me to produce. Take from that what you will.
In other news today, I was out for lunch with some old colleagues who hadn’t heard about UKLUG. So if you’re based in the UK and you know some developers or admins who you think may be interested in the Lotus world, just mention the site to them in case they haven’t heard about it. When I told my friends about the incredible 22 different sponsors that Warren has arranged, they were blown away and should be registering as I type. Really, for two days, with great free sessions, access to sponsors and IBM-ers, I’m not sure why you wouldn’t register. It’s only a couple of weeks away.
