via Fiona
Lotusphere Best Practices Session on IdeaJam
Mac has announced that IdeaJam will be used to gather feedback on Best Practices sessions for Lotusphere in January. So if you’re wanting to get your session included, make sure to add it to IdeaJam so that people can say how great they think it is. I’m sure it will be a big help if you get a positive response on IdeaJam. You can go and have a look at any sesisons that people have posted here. If fact you may even be the first person to post if you get in quickly.
XPages Progress and UKLUG
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.
Lotusphere Solutions Development Labs
The warm up for Lotusphere is beginning a little later than usual this year. But I did meet Tim Clarke for the first time this week and he is looking to find out what people want to see at the Solutions Development Lab in Florida in January. If you have ideas then head over to his blog and leave a comment.
European XPages Workshop
Back in May when the first public beta of Notes Domino 8.5 was released I was less than happy with it. Well for the last couple of days I’ve been at the European version of the XPages workshop along with 30 or so other people at IBM Dublin.
The format for the couple of days was to work through creating an example application which uses some of the new XPages functionality. So we’ve just finished and I am sat back in the hotel catching up on emails and missed work, but I wanted to post a few first impressions.
Firstly, the workshop itself was very well organised, I don’t think any of us knew what to expect but when you have the kind of people involved like Maureen Leland, Philippe Riand and Eamon Muldoon it’s going to be interesting whatever happens. The sample application we were developing was very simple in nature but it did lead to some “eureka” moments for me. (It’s important to note that these are my impressions, not official IBM words!)
The decision to not include the LotusScript and Java editors in 8.5 is still a bad one but it’s a lot clearer to me why it was made now. We have just spent two days working on a web app that looks *great* out of the box, and although it would be possible in current versions it would require a lot of coding different design elements to work together. But with an XPage you just have to write Javascript in the XPage design element itself, there is no requirement to write agents. Obviously I have been thinking about XPage enabling IdeaJam and I genuinely think that it can be done using just XPages as opposed to the huge array of forms, pages, views and agents that would be required to get it working currently.
There are still a lot of the benefits of Eclipse that can be made use of that maybe haven’t been pushed as much as they might be…
– The search facility in Eclipse really works well for looking across design elements for instances of code (very similar in functionality to the way I use TeamStudio Configurator), a very useful addition.
– Likewise the compare with feature (although it’s only useful for fully DXL compliant design elements) this could prove to be a great boon for the developer.
– There’s a new “Edit with DXL” menu option which could well increase the use of DXL, which in turn (we can only hope) will improve the round tripping ability of DXL so that in the fullness of time we might be able to think about using SubVersion and other tools which “normal” Eclipse developers take for granted.
We got some great tips about how to develop an XPage, it’s a massive change for the old school Domino developer, but after a while it begins to make sense with some really neat little bits and pieces. For example you can link together client side and server side JavaScript so that simple decision making can be given to the browser while serious business logic remains on the server where it should be. The use of CSS and themes should offer realy flexibility in the look and feel of an app.
Wow that was all a real stream of conciousness posting. As I spend more time on XPages over the next weeks and months I hope to post some useful tips and examples.
If you’re a Domino developer I would definitely recommend downloading the latest beta, it’s a lot more stable and usable than the last one. And get going on learning XPages, they are the way of the future for Domino web development, you need to be learning this stuff. And best of all… it’s actually fun to use 🙂
Laptop in the shop
Over the last few days the Bluetooth on my laptop has become progressively less reliable, to the point where, this morning the keyboard and mouse would work for two minutes before needing to be reset. So I got an appointment at the “Genius” bar at the Apple Store at lunchtime and had my worst fears confirmed. It’s a hardware failure so they kept hold of it to replace the radio and the antenna.
I’ve not had the best of luck with the reliability of my main laptop with the last one needing to be repaired twice before I replaced it. Maybe I just use them too much but it does annoy me slightly that what is meant to be premium kit is quite so flakey.
Anyway, I have learned from previous experience and have a backup machine to use so it’s not the end of the world. Things just take a little longer to do now. Roll on Friday when I can (hopefully) pick up the fixed computer.
UKLUG is a month away
Warren has just blogged that the agenda for UKLUG has been published. There’s only a month to go until the event now and it’s all beginning to come together nicely. There are still a few speaking slots to be announced but hopefully, if you haven’t already signed up, then the quality of the speakers on offer will be enough to persuade you.
If not then have a look at the list of sponsors, there are now 22 of them which is pretty amazing for a user group event, so if you work with any Lotus technologies then you’ll almost certainly meet someone interesting in the sponsors area, a session or of course the bar. And it’s all free!
Registration spaces are beginning to run out now so have a word with your boss and get yourself booked in.
Beer and bikes in Bruges
A group of friends and myself spent the weekend in Bruges, Belgium mainly to catch up with each other and just chill out with a few Belgian beers. Luckily the weather was just great on Saturday which allowed us to hire a couple of bikes and a tandem to arse around on for the day. So we cycled round the town, stopping every few hundred metres to sample a new beer, I can highly recommend this as a good way to spend your Saturday, although I do need to apologise for the various tourists that we left scattered in our wake as we barrelled down the main shopping street at Mach 1!
The Eurostar worked faultlessly and overall we had a great time. Now I really need to get some sleep before a hectic week of work for multiple different clients.
Web Service Tips
I know you’re not meant to apologise for going quiet on a blog, but things have definitely been quiet around here recently. It’s only good news from my point of view, work has really taken off over the last few weeks.
For the last week I have been mostly designing and implementing some pretty complex WS-I compliant web services to be hosted on a 7.0.2 Domino server. This is harder (and surprisingly more fun) than it sounds as Domino’s web services implementation in 7 is pretty outdated these days. Basically there are a few things I would point you at to get you started…
Julian’s article about web services is a great starting point for complex web services, but because it’s a couple of years old now it only takes you so far.
Then you need to have a look at this article about web services in Domino 8 which offers quite a lot of ND 7 specific content, especially about manually editing WSDL files to make them WS-I compliant. To be honest I found this to be a case of trial and error, there are a *lot* of obscure rules which have to be complied with, especially if you’re passing arrays or Base64 encoded data (both of which, of course, I am doing).
The actual writing of the services is pretty simple, they’re basically just agents, but then next challenge is doing some load testing. Enter Soap UI a free tool which provides some great tools. It allows you to consume your new service very easily which is cool for testing. But then the really useful tool is a load testing implementation which allows you to really stress test your service to see what happens when you’re running 500 requests a second against it. Believe me it’s not pretty! So now I have to spend some time making the services really bullet proof in terms of error handling and performance.
I may be a little odd, but I really enjoy doing this sort of work. And luckily, for the moment, I’m able to spend almost all of my time writing code. Long may it last!