Blog & Technical Insights

Two weeks from now I’ll be speaking at Engage.ug, along with a host of illustrious names from IBM and the community. I’ll be speaking with Martin Jinoch about the OpenNTF Domino API. After speaking on the API solo at various user groups and during speedgeeking at IBM Connect, it will be interesting to co-host the […]

Some time ago Niklas Heidloff blogged about three kinds of XPages developers – those who just use drag and drop with SSJS / JavaScript; those who use Java but only in an NSF; and those who develop with Java outside the NSF. For some time I’ve been doing some development outside the NSF, but after […]

This rant is not the result of any individual project,I’ve been meaning to write it for a while. It’s also as much out of disillusionment of believing web developers who say you can switch off compatibility mode, because it’s not what happens necessarily. When developing for a corporate environment, the default browser is usually Internet […]

There has been considerable work on the Discussion Database over recent years, adding an XPage interface and a host of features. If you look at the R9 installs, you’ll see there is a version for 8.5.3 and another for R9. But you need to be careful if you have upgraded a server to 9.0.1 because […]

I’ve just released a new version of XPages OpenLog Logger. It’s predominantly a release to catch SSJS errors of classes NotesException and java.io.IOException, as well as wrapping processUncaughtException code in try/catch blocks, to capture any classes I haven’t come across yet. I and other developers have encountered these unexpected error class types when no try/catch […]

There have been a few posts today on StackOverflow about SSJS being run when it’s not expected. I think a lot of that comes from a misunderstanding of what’s happening on the server. Parsing of Values Firstly, property values are just plain text.That’s reinforced if you look at the Java class for an XPage or […]

Niklas Heidloff’s session with Henning Schmen at IBM Connect – AD206: Build Apps Rapidly by Leveraging Services from IBM Collaboration Solutions on Wednesday 5:30 – was very interesting from a number of aspects. I’ve long believed that part of the barrier to Connections development is that many developers not to mention end users can’t envisage […]

First of all, I’m not saying back-end developers are real men or are the only ones who have “Curiosity”! But I’ve begun to realise more and more that XPages developers are either back-end or front-end, features or look & feel. In the old days of Notes Client development, the two were so tightly coupled that […]

Notes and Domino have long been lampooned as a bad user experience. From an app dev point of view, XPages came along and gave us some freedom. Notes 9.0 gave us a fresh UI and some nice usability enhancements (Ctrl + v to paste as plain text, Quick Find box, Group By Date etc). On […]