Earlier this month Tim Clark invited me to take part in The X Cast with himself, David Leedy of Notes in 9, and Stephan Wissel. The podcast is now available here. It was an enjoyable experience – more of a chat with friends because I’ve met Tim on a few occasions during my time at Intec, not least on an XPages course that he ran and I attended last year. And I’ve been in contact with David on a number of topics recently via email and Twitter, so it was good to finally speak to him. It’s well worth listening to, whether you’re just getting started with XPages or have had a bit of experience. Even if you’ve already built a few XPages applications, a tip from Paul Hannan is well worth taking advantage of. For those who haven’t come across Paul, he’s very knowledgeable and active in the community, particularly on the Domino Designer Wiki and through the XPages Blog.
And this brings me to another bit of news. I have been accepted as an author on the XPages Blog, so look out for content from me there too. It’s a resource anyone working on XPages should be looking at regularly because it’s full of excellent tips from an illustrious list of contributors, plus there are the two lists of resources – resources added as pages on the XPages Blog via the link in the right sidebar and external resources aggregated on the Resources page accessible from the top tab.
As far as I’m concerned, XPages as a development platform is the way to go for any new browser-based applications. XPages allows you to build once for all major browsers much more easily with a single framework of code to produce powerful functionality and a rich user interface. Although I didn’t do a huge amount of traditional web development, coding in XPages is, in my experience, quicker than traditional web development. There are some peculiarities which you have to get used to, but there are always peculiarities whatever you’re doing. When I hit problems, it can take some time to overcome – sometimes a quick search on the web solves the problem, although I’m not surprised if it takes half a day. But there is a huge amount of material out there about XPages with more being added each day, which makes it more likely that you’ll find a solution. And unlike traditional web development, because all of it is Domino-based you’re less likely to need to integrate multiple frameworks, javascript libraries or css files that might cause a conflict and produce problems that require you to go digging into the code and work out why you’ve hit a problem. Don’t get me wrong, you will have to look at code from time to time, particularly if you want to take advantage of the OneUI or OneUIv2 frameworks that come with Domino 8.5.1 or the dojo code (including xspClientDojo.js), but you can get a long way without needing to start digging. And so far I haven’t mentioned the ability to write once, deliver twice for browser and Notes Client, giving the same interface and rich functionality, even on a local replica. And the server-side javascript allows the developer to deliver that single interface with a much smaller gap to traditional Notes Client functionality. Yes, some areas are more challenging – dialog boxes in particular – but the resources available are making this much easier. And as a developer whose experience has mainly been on Notes Client development, the ability to integrate @Formulas into Server-Side Javascript is amazingly useful.
Yes, it’s going to take time and be a big job to migrate some applications to XPages from traditional web or Notes client. But in my opinion, it’s when not if, because the benefits are undeniable.