After a hectic few days I’ve had a chance to draw breath and review my experiences of ILUG 2010 last week in Belfast. Compared to other LUGs it is more laid-back, as proven by Kevin Cavanaugh’s relaxed dress code. But this should not be taken to suggest it’s any less busy, informative and educational than any other LUG. Indeed the quality of speakers – from Europe, the States and beyond – make this a great conference to attend both in terms of the sessions attended and the opportunities for networking. The timing – just a couple of weeks after LoLA and a couple of months before Lotusphere – also give a useful insight into the work done on the Lotusd products since Lotusphere. I’m not attending DNUG this week, but I suspect the timing of that conference affords its attendees similar benefits.
Amongst the attendees there certainly seemed to be a large number of developers and most sessions in the developer track were well-attended. From what I heard some of the management track sessions (excepting LEGO 101) were not so well-attended, which suggests not a high number of managers attending. It would be interesting to find out if that impression was true, or whether the majority of managers were also either devs / admins, so attended those sessions. If managers were not attending, hopefully the messages about the vibrancy and future direction of Lotus products will have been effectively disseminated back. Although the enthusiasm of developers has value, the support of managers and other decision-makers is crucial to ensure a healthy future for Lotus products.
In terms of the future, the live demo of Project Concord was very impressive. One of the limitations of Google Docs, or any other collaborative approach I’ve seen, is that they do not clearly delineate responsibilities in working on a document and they do not help ensure accountability. They allow collaboration, but do not support it. Project Concord provides all the functionality I’ve seen in Google Docs, but also provides functionality to assign sections to a user to complete. Any section that has been assigned is made obvious with a border showing who it has been assigned to. Once completed, the border is removed. I’m looking forward to being able to use the beta in LotusLive Labs (scheduled for availability around Lotusphere) to see how it works in practice for collaborative development and review of a document.
As the customers Intec supports move to R8 and above of Domino, Symphony integration has been a topic I’ve always wanted to work on, particularly as I’ve done plenty of integration with Microsoft Office and battled against with the ever-changing APIs, particularly around tables in MS Word. Kathy Brown’s session showed integration with Symphony Spreadsheets and demonstrated how similar it is to integration with Microsoft Office. That has encouraged me to stop procrastinating and start integrating with Symphony, even though there may be issues with the quality of documentation for the Symphony APIs.
Dojo was very prominent in the conference, which is good to hear, particularly as I was speaking on the topic! In addition to my own session and that of Bernd Hort, Dojo was a significant element of Matt White’s speedgeeking session as well as being included in Matt White and Tim Clark’s XPages tips session and, indirectly, in the XPages Extension Library shown in Martin Donnelly and Tony McGuckin’s session. I’m disappointed I wasn’t able to attend the session on XPages and jQuery, because it seems that framework is also very easy to integrate. All of this gives a large number of pre-built tools for developers to take advantage of in XPages development.
Martin Donnelly and Tony McGuckin’s session was also illuminating to show how the Extension Library fits into the future direction and vision of Project Vulcan. Project Vulcan is now becoming less nebulous and appears to be focussed on improving the user experience. oneui has been around for a while, as has the XPages Framework template that implements oneui. But by using the Extension Library means the layout and styling will be converted with minimal work when oneuiv2.1 and oneuiv3.x themes are included in Domino in the 8.5.3 and RNext timeframes. The oneuiv2.1 theme is already visible in Lotus Greenhouse.
Paul Calhoun’s session “Using XML and RDBMS as XPage Data Sources” also introduced techniques I am sure I will be using in the future to integrate XML and non-Domino data into XPages. It was surprisingly easy and introduces great power to XPages.
Plus, of course, how can one mention ILUG without mentioning the best session of all, Steve McDonagh’s unofficial history of Ireland. All in all, another excellent conference.
For those awaiting the slides and demo application from my session, these will be coming shortly, both here and on the ILUG website. Since running the session I decided to create a version of my demo application without the requirement for XPages Extension Library. It will also work on 8.5.1 where the dojoType and dojoAttributes properties are not supported for xp:inputText, xp:inputTextarea and xp:comboBox.
