xpages

Lotus UK Power of Business Applications

Darren Adams has already mentioned this day on 16th June, but I thought I’d just make sure that people know about it as well.

Basically what Darren has organised is a day all about Lotus application development in the real world. So I’m going to speak a little about the history of IdeaJam, where we are and hot we got here. Then in the afternoon I’m back on my favourite hobby horse; XPages development. This time the title for the session is “Rejuvenating Domino Web Applications with XPages”.

There looks like there’s some really great content during the day, so if you have anything to do with Domino applications (that’s development, implementation, management, or anything else really, this isn’t an overly techie day) then it will probably be worth you coming along.

And best of all, it’s free. You just need to register here.

May 18, 2010 by 0

XPages101 done. (for now)

Yesterday, Ben Poole and myself presented the XPages101 course which I have designed over the last couple of months to be an introduction to developing with XPages.

Overall it seemed to go pretty well, the timings need some work, I went a little fast at some points which may have left a few people overwhelmed at the fire hose of information we got through in a short period of time! That will not happen again now that I understand how it all hangs together a bit more.

The feedback from the attendees was really gratifying…

Question Score
Overall, how would you rate the course? 95% (between Excellent and Good)
How was the course material? 86.67% (between Excellent and Good)
How was the presentation style? 86.67% (between Excellent and Good)
Would you recommend the course to your colleagues / nerdy friends? Yes: 100%

 

Obviously there’s always room for improvement and there were some great feedback comments as well…

“A real eye opener for me as I’ve not looked XPages prior to the course.”

“Excellent value for money. Pitched just right for the first steps into XPages.”

“It gave me a very good understanding of XPages under the bonnet.”

“It was great being here, great course, the XPages start I was looking for.”

One of the things which I had consciously not done was provide lots of handout materials. The aim was to reduce the costs of the course as much as possible. From the feedback it seems people would have been happy to pay extra to get more paper based materials. So I think in future iterations of the course we’ll change that around.

The other area where a couple of people expressed an interest was for an “intermediate” course. This leaves me in a bit of a quandary, as I’m not sure I know what intermediate is. So if you have any thoughts I’d love to hear them.

Overall though, as I said earlier, it was a great day. Good fun for me, and hopefully useful to everyone else.

February 10, 2010 by 4

Taking Notes Podcast Episode 100

Yesterday, Bruce and Julian were kind enough to invite Peter Presnell, Declan Lynch and myself to have a bit of a chat about XPages on the land mark 100th episode of the Taking Notes Podcast. The chat itself seemed to go OK, but even if you’re not interested, you should listen to the podcast for the first 4 minutes if nothing else. 

Rob Novak managed to organise the Lotus Community (like herding cats at the best of times) to record their own individual congratulations for Bruce and Julian. We get to enjoy the fruits of his work at the start of the podcast.

So go and take a listen. And here’s to another 100 episodes of a great Lotus tradition.

October 26, 2009 by 0

Domino Designer is Free!

I can’t imagine why you’ve not seen this news, but just in case, with the release of Notes / Domino 8.5.1 next Monday, Domino Designer will now be free.

This is huge news for the platform, as it means that anyone can download and have a play with 8.5.1 which is the first really good version of Domino Designer on Eclipse. It means that you can have a play with XPages without having to worry about CALs. And I’d really recommend taking that look, whereas XPages in 8.5.0 were very much a “dot zero” release, with 8.5.1 we have a vastly improved dev environment and hugely increased performance and stability on the server side.

If you’re in any doubt about what you can achieve with XPages in a relatively short amount of time (i.e. less than it took us to develop the first version of IdeaJam), then have a look at http://IQJam.net, the first commercially available application developed specifically for Domino 8.5.1 using XPages.

October 6, 2009 by 0

IQJam Beta is live

As you may have seen, Bruce announced the beta release of IQJam overnight. We’ve been bashing on about IQJam for a couple of months now, so I thought I’d give a little background on what it is and where it came from.

The original genesis of the application came, as these things do, from several different places at once. Within two weeks, three of our IdeaJam customers spoke to us and said they were looking for ways of building up databases of solutions to problems. Of course, each of them had a slightly different take, one wanted to enhance their Help Desk, another is rolling out a new methodology and needs support in that process for people new to the way of working being introduced.

As is normal on this blog, I don’t really concentrate on the business side of things, more the technical as that’s my day job. It got us thinking anyway, and taking the experiences we had from rolling out IdeaJam and the characteristics of our existing customers into account we made several technical decisions up front.

Run on XPages, which in turn lead us to make the choice to only run on Domino 8.5.1. This was actually a very easy decision. I have been hugely surprised over the last year at how willing companies are to take their servers right up to the latest version of the Domino server. 8.5.1 will be coming out sometime soon (as we have learned from Ed’s blog) and our expectation is that most of the 8.5.0 servers will be quickly upgraded and that those people not wanting to go with a “.0” release will also follow on soon behind. In terms of the XPages side of things, the changes that we have been given in 8.5.1 make XPages so much faster, more stable and usable that I have really loved the last 4 months of coding even on the beta releases.

Just to give you an idea of the performance. The live IQJam server has an old Pentium 4 processor and a single hard drive. My impression is that with the release of 8.5.1, XPages will actually overtake classic HTTP in terms of performance.

Support “modern” browsers, that is – IE6 can take a back seat. This, I suspect will be our most controversial decision. Not amongst developers of course as we all know that IE6 needs to die, and die quickly. But it is still a corporate standard in many companies. What we have learned with IdeaJam, though, is that the companies most interested in “social software” also seem to be the companies that keep most up to date with their software, including web browsers. I can honestly say that I have not even looked at IQJam in IE6 and have no plans to. That being said, everything should work fine, there may be some UI discrepancies where we are using funky CSS etc, but life is too short to support IE6 so we have no plans to. At all. Was that definitive enough? 😉

Administer everything from the web. This was a relatively easy decision, one of the surprises about IdeaJam is the number of people that we host the application for on our server (witness the recent Lotus Knows IdeaJam event). In IdeaJam we have put as many administration function into the browser as possible, but for IQJam we wanted to make everything available for the hosted customer. So from the browser it is possible to control the look and feel of the application, messages that get displayed to the user, graphics, emails, and every single other configuration option.

Over the next few weeks and months, I plan to dig a little deeper into the XPages side of things, how we do certain things and why we did them that way. But for the moment, head on over to iqjam.net and have a dig around. You can log in with your existing IdeaJam user name and password, or register if you’ve not used IdeaJam before.

September 16, 2009 by 0

Sessions, sessions, sessions

When is a session not a session?

Most Domino web sites these days will be running some form of session authentication which stores a cookie on the user’s browser and a tiny piece of memory with details about the user on the server. This has always worked fine, and of course these sessions can time out (by default after 30 minutes).

But with the advent of XPages we now also have the sessionScope variable container which allows us to store information about a user’s session (whether they are authenticated or not). This offers us huge opportunities for performance improvements as it means we don’t need to keep on doing @DbLookups to get user specific information for every page load. But it does introduce some potential issues if the authentication session timeouts are different to the sessionScope timeouts.

Basically the server needs to be able to clear out sessionScope variables after an amount of time, otherwise the server would run out of memory very quickly indeed. But in a recent project we had users who would open a page and then come back to it 2 or 3 hours later and then wonder why everything had stopped working. This is because the default timeout for sessionScope variables is something around 30 minutes and our session timeouts were set to 2 hours.  So once the page had been left inactive for half an hour it effectively lost all of the background information that drove how it should act when the user pressed the save button for example.

The solution is very simple, but very important. In the application properties for your database (opened in Domino Designer these days remember), go to the XPages tab and make sure to set the Session timeout field to be more than the authentication Session Timeout (which you set in the server or website document). The rule of thumb that we have come to (in the absence of any official guidelines from IBM) is that if you have a 2 hour authentication timeout for your website, then set the XPages Session Timeout to 3 hours.

Generally the application timeout is less important for this sort of thing, but we took the opportunity to also set that to 3 hours in this case as I knew it wouldn’t be too large.

There are, of course, caveats here. If your server has memory issues then this is only going to exacerbate them as for each user (remember a user is just a visitor to the website, not necessarily someone who logs in) is going to take up some memory from the server for a minimum of 3 hours, but for us it solves more problems than it causes.

Of course, if you are not using the sessionScope to store any page sensitive data then you can just ignore all of this, but once you start using the sessionScope, it does become rather addictive, so I suspect you will get some benefit from setting this variable. Either way if you start to see completely bizarre errors, this may be a good first port of call.

Hopefully this article will save someone the pain of trying to debug seemingly un-reproducible errors in a dev environment where you don’t have the time to leave pages inactive for hours on end!

September 10, 2009 by 4

IQJam Announced

IQJam by Elguji Software, LLC

After all the cruel teasing, today it has become obvious what Bruce and I have been working on for the last couple of months. IQJam is still very much a work in progress but we are getting there and so far we are really proud of what we’ve achieved. it looks great, performs very well and will be a great tool for many companies and communities.

Over the next weeks there’ll be more news as we progress and of course we’ll be running our beta programme for people to get involved, get an early peek and help shape what we hope will become a mainstay product on the Lotus Domino platform.

Once again we’re happy to prove that you can create kick-ass web applications on Domino. And this time it’s made even easier with the use of XPages.

Until we’re ready to go into beta, if you’d like any more information, or have a potential use for the application in your company please contact us and we’d love to get into more detail with you.

July 27, 2009 by 3

Dojo ToolTips

Tooltips are one of those little features which you rarely have the time to add to your website (beyond the basic title settings of your HTML elements), but do add a surprising amount of polish to your application from your user’s point of view.

In an application that I have been working on recently, we added some tooltips to convey some specific information on how to use certain features and the extra help went over really well. But how do you add them in XPages?

Well Dojo is your friend, and more specifically one of the “dijit” package of plugins called dijit.ToolTip. So in your XPage you add a computed field with the display type set to HTML. In the value of the field add the following:

“<div dojoType=\”dijit.Tooltip\”\n” +

“connectId=\”” + getClientId(“hoverlabel”) + “\” style=\”display:none;\”>\n” +

“This is a tooltip\n” +

“</div>”;

Basically what we’re doing is creating a div that will get written out to the browser, the important elements are the dojoType which tells Dojo that this is something it needs to look at when the page loads. The connectId links the div to the label which we want to add the tooltip to. So in this case, I have a label called “hoverlabel”. Set the div to be hidden using CSS so that while Dojo is processing it after the page load, it doesn’t appear and then disappear very quickly.

Finally we just need to make sure that Dojo is enabled on our XPage, so:

  1. Go to the All Properties of your XPage and then Basics, make sure that dojoParseOnLoad is set to true
  2. I also set the dojoTheme to true as well.
  3. Then in the resources property (still in All Properties -> Basics) click the Add button and choose xp:dojoModule)
  4. In the dojoModule -> basics -> name property which gets added, set the value to “dijit.Tooltip”

 It’s really very simple to get going and this is what you end up with:

A really nice looking tooltip with no coding on from out point of view that will be very helpful for your users.

July 13, 2009 by 15

New XPages Blog

Bruce (ever trying new things) has gathered together a few people who are using XPages a lot in their day jobs to form a group blog over at xpagesblog.com. Hopefully over the next weeks and months we can put together a really good library of XPages news, development techniques, tip and tricks for the community to use.

There’s already some good stuff up there, so it’s well worth a look.

July 12, 2009 by 5

Load testing XPages with the help of IBM

Mick Moignard and I have been down at IBM Hursley for a few days working on load testing an XPages application we’ve written for a customer.

Mick talks more about the (very impressive from our point of view) details, but I just wanted to add my voice to his in saying thanks to the team down there, especially Andy Walter who really helped us out with anything we needed, from server hardware, load testing software, expertise in building the kit and so on. 

If you are a BP in the UK then I’d highly recommend having a chat with the team down there. And I believe there are equivalent set ups in a lot of other countries around the world. It is nice to be able to praise IBM every now and again!

July 9, 2009 by 0