Posts Tagged ‘Domino’

Tomorrow (April 23rd) I will be speaking on the IBM Collaboration Solutions Community Meeting at 3pm BST (10am ET). The topic of this month's meeting is XPages. The main part of the community meeting will see Abby Butts and Sam Bridegroom talking about how they have used XPages to develop applications to benefit a not-for-profit healthcare system. In the community member spotlight I'll briefly talk about org.openntf.domino, a project that has got those of us involved in it enthused about the benefits and possibilities and has been well-received by a number of early adopters. Since the release one of the ...

Yesterday marked the release of the first milestone of org.openntf.domino, a community-driven project with a number of goal: To make it quicker and easier to handle Domino objects. To avoid gotchas for new Java developers like recycle(). To give useful parameter names to all methods. To extend the packages with additional functionality. To implement best practice approaches from our experience of Java development in XPages and elsewhere. To lower the learning curve for developers, whether they are coming from traditional Domino development or traditional Java development. The initial release is aimed primarily at those who already have Java knowledge and are able to hit the ground running, ...

Declan Lynch has been writing a very comprehensive introduction to Java for XPages developers. I would strongly encourage it for any XPages developer. Like many Domino Developers, my Java experience was limited at best prior to XPages, but a knowledge of Java opens up a door to greater power. You can take advantage of managed beans, VariableResolvers, ValueChangeListeners, Controllers and other objects that are the bedrock upon which XPages is built. You can take advantage of a wealth of resources from outside of Domino with greater confidence such as date formatting classes, pre-created code for building spreadsheets, documents or PDFs. ...

During February Bob Balfe has been blogging 28 days of Dojo. To tie in with that I've decided now is a good time to blog about a couple of charting enhancements I included in my Lotusphere session with Dave Leedy, XPages: Enter The Dojo. The first is new functionality available with Dojo 1.5.0 to add gradients to your charts. First of all, Dojo 1.5.0 is not installed by default with Domino 8.5.2, so it will require an install on the server and (if you're using your charts for XPages in Notes Client) also on the clients. The ...

Like so many others, I was glad to read yesterday's article by Ed Brill about the IBM whitepaper on Domino as a RAD platform. This had come to my attention shortly before Christmas and although the timing was unfortunate in some ways, nevertheless it did provide Ed with the great opportunity to highlight it at the beginning of January and start well what I hope will be a good year. For too long Domino has seemed the neglected sibling of Websphere Portal when application development is mentioned. And following the release Q3 last year of LotusLive Notes, which ...

As I mentioned on This Week in Lotus last week, I've been working on a submission to OpenNTF. In fact I've had it pretty much ready to go for months now, I just never got round to submitting it and the topic of OpenNTF on This Week in Lotus gave me the opportunity I needed to back myself into a corner so that I could procrastinate no longer. The project is called Audit Comments Custom Control, although the custom control is so configurable that it can capture comments from the user in a dialog and store them back to any ...

This week I was invited to take part in This Week in Lotus, the main topic for which was the XPages Extension Library and OpenNTF. I would strongly recommend any XPages developer to listen to the podcast, it's one of the resources I use rigorously to keep me up to date on all things Lotus and I always learn something from the podcast. As part of the Domino managed beta program I was able to follow the articles on the XPages Extensibility API published to the Notes & Domino App Dev wiki in the summer. I have ...

Those who have followed my blog will be aware that I posted an article earlier this year about extending the Rich Text Editor. That showed that the Rich Text Editor used an extension of a dojo class, ibm.domino.widget.layout.DominoRichText, and could be extended by defining various dojoAttributes, for example fontName as Arial, extraPlugins as ["createLink","|"] to add a button to create a link and a separator. With 8.5.2, IBM introduced the CKEditor as the default Rich Text Editor instead of the ibm.domino.widget.layout.DominoRichText extension of Dojo. And, as I learned, that too can be extended, from the ...

With today's announcement of a release date for Domino 8.5.2, it seems the right time to review some of the features I've come to like in the closed beta. Some of them are just usability enhancements, others are functionality enhancements, and many are XPages enhancements. Before continuing, I must include the caveat that this article is based on the 8.5.2 Code Drop 5 beta, and that code is not guaranteed to be included in the Gold release due on August 24th. Help The quality of the Help files in 8.5.2, particularly for XPages, has been widely criticised. The Help in ...

This follows on from two previous articles where I outlined what became evident from the oneui themes, ways to reference server-based resources from XPages. Those articles (Part One and Part Two) concentrated on images, the most useful resource. Like many developers, at Intec we have a suite of databases with resources (some images, css files, script libraries etc) residing in a single database. When referencing resources, if you prefix the database path with "/" the output HTML is prefixed with the current database path as well. This resulted in me using SSJS to get the full host ...

When I first started on XPages last year, one of the big benefits was that virtually anything can be computed. When you do so, you get the option to use three languages: Expression Language (EL), Server Side Javascript (SSJS) or Custom. I immediately started using Server Side Javascript, but the others were a bit of a mystery. If you have experience of JSF or JSP, you'll know about Expression Language. But as a developer whose main experience was Notes Client development, and some classic Domino web development, it meant nothing to me. If I'm not the only one, hopefully this blog post will demystify ...

Just to remind anyone who didn't read my post last week, the gist was that I noticed my autosave database was very large, even though it had no documents in it and rarely had documents in it. The apparent cause was that default Space Savers setting on the Replication Settings was set, so documents were removed after 90 days, and deletion stubs after 30 days. So I made the seemingly obvious step of reducing the duration, so documents were removed after 3 days and deletion stubs would be deleted each day. This seemed a great idea. But all good plans and ...

Our Domino Administrator noticed today that the as_XXXXX.nsf database was extremely large. This is the database used to store documents and emails if autosave is turned on. Autosave was a new option with R7, if my memory is correct, and although I've never used it for a Form in a database (most forms tend to be quite small), I've found it invaluable on a number of occasions for emails and Symphony documents. Being curious I also had a look at my own as_pwithers.nsf database. It was nearly 400Mb. When I opened the database there were no documents in any of the views, which ...

Over the last week I've been rather busy including some XPages functionality in an existing Domino web application, and as an example I wanted to explain why I chose XPages, some steps I took and the main challenge I encountered. XPages suited for this because: We wanted the available documents to change depending on selections, so a view panel looking to a view filtered on key worked well. We could easily allow users to process multiple documents depending on selections using viewPanel.getSelectedIds() We could easily pull in information for multiple documents from multiple databases with good performance and show it with Dojo tooltips. We ...

A little over a year ago I went on an XPages course. The power of XPages to develop a scalable, flexible solution was obvious. Ok, one of my colleagues will admit that I wasn't convinced after day one of the course. I was working on upgrading an existing web application. But after day two I was salivating at the power of repeat controls to display and edit documents in a imaginative layout. At about the same time I had tried promoting my first novel to a couple of agents, and got rejections. I expected to get rejections, that didn't influence me. ...