DDE Local Preview and CKEditor

For a long time I’ve been a strong advocate of using a local Domino server for XPages development. DDE Local preview had its place for Notes Client development, but has not had the required investment to keep pace with XPages enhancements. There are now too many quirks and workarounds required when using local preview to justify it as a viable tool. And the amount of development required to address those issues (not to mention QA and testing), even if possible do not justify the request. With the limited resources available to Domino app dev evident from recent years, an entitlement for Domino developers to a free Domino development server is a better investment of community expectations, as well as being better aligned to web application development beyond Domino.

This week’s experience was another example to justify that requirement. When delivering training on a platform and evangelise about the strengths of embracing newer technologies, the last thing you want is something out-of-the-box that should work but doesn’t. So when the exercise being used was dragging and dropping a Rich Text control onto the XPage, it was very frustrating to hear that the control was not showing at all when previewed. Firebug’s console showed the message “Uncaught [CKEDITOR.resourceManager.load] Resource name
“lotusspellchecker” was not found at “http://localhost/xsp/.ibmxspres/domino/ckeditor/plugins/lotussp
ellchecker/plugin.js?t=F1QF””, precisely the message displayed on this technote for 9.0.1, precisely the version being used.

The technote is not very helpful, with the Local Fix “None”. I tried the “unsupported” fix of replacing the com.ibm.xsp.dojo plugin in the <Notes
program>\directory>\osgi\shared\eclipse\plugins folder with the version in <Notes program directory>\framework\shared\eclipse\plugins folder. There have been a number of issues during the 9.0.1 fix packs with missing files and files incorrectly deleted, so I was hopeful. But that didn’t solve the problem. Searching all the various CKEditor files on the server for “lotusspellchecker” also proved fruitless. All I could find were references to “ibmspellchecker”.

Eventually after quite some time, and getting this comment on a StackOverflow answer I’d provided whhere the developer solved the problem by merging CSS files, I thought to look at Xsp Properties “Use runtime optimized JavaScript and CSS resources”. By default this is now ticked on all applications, and I was aware of some problems that it has caused.

Sure enough de-selecting that setting made the CKEditor appear, and work as intended. Developers are the only ones who will work on a locally previewed XPage and only because using a personal Domino server requires a license. Anyone who knows anything about XPages development knows that a shared development server is no longer appropriate, because of source control usage, sessionAsSigner issues, debugging requirements (which only allow a single developer to debug at a time) etc. The requirement of a Domino server license for developers is long overdue and is standard with Websphere Liberty Profile. Indeed Liberty goes well beyond that, if making the license free for development, testing and limited production usage. Hopefully in the near future developers will be able to develop locally as they do for production.