It's painless moving to XPages

Over the last month or so we’ve been spending a lot of time doing testing of the new version of IdeaJam so that the XPages plays well with “Classic” (as we’ve taken to calling it). Today we got to the point where we applied the latest beta template against a copy of the IdeaJam production database. Shock of shocks, everything worked exactly as designed. It’s getting to the point where even we can’t tell the difference between the classic and the new versions (which is what we were aiming for). So we get all of the benefits of XPages and very little of the pain from the user’s point of view of things changing because there’s a new technology under the hood.

IdeaJam “Classic” is a good Domino web application (if I do say so myself), but to work on the design of it requires any developers that help us to have a serious amount of experience with Domino web development (I’m talking like 5 years plus). But with our XPages version there really is none of that history required, all the new design elements can be worked on by a developer with the same experience as me, or indeed any other XPages developer, 3 months. It means that we can go from having to worry about all of the Domino “hacks” to make things work, to concentrating on the important stuff… developing a kick-ass application for our customers.

So this is the XPages version of IdeaJam:
and this is the classic version:

So now our copy of production is at the point where we can go to the database launch properties and flick between launch a navigator and an XPage when the user goes to the home URL, and that is all that needs to be done to switch between classic and the XPage version.

Obviously from our point of view there’s a lot of work behind the scenes going on, but for our customers, switching to XPages couldn’t be easier.

Share