XSPtalk - Notes / Domino and Web Development Blog

LS12 Slides for SHOW111 - How YOU deliver mobile applications the easy way with XPages Web Apps

Chris Connor — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:17:08 +0100

Again thanks to everyone who attended the session. Really pleased with the great feedback so far.

The following link is link to the slides from the presentation. Will be developing and contributing the Blog Reader App to OpenNTF in the coming weeks so look out!

Link to Presentation

Link zip of associated files

LS12 Slides for BP118 - Using Java to build applications fit for the enterprise

Chris Connor — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:23:53 +0100

Guys thanks for the great feedback on my session - the following link contains the presentation files for your information.

Will be upgrading and publishing the library files in this application onto OpenNTF in the coming weeks. I will also post the instructions on creating and working with OSGI libraries as discussed in my session.

Link to Presentation

Day 1 Lotusphere - Business Development Day

Chris Connor — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 13:01:38 +0100

Long day yesterday travelling from Glasgow via Dublin to Orlando - pretty smooth to be honest. The "new" immigration process conducted in Dublin meant that when I landed it was straight through to pick up bags - almost like an internal flight!

Anyway "settled in" yesterday evening well. Great evening (although jet lag took its toll) I attempted to soldier on through to around midnight.

Looking forward to the announcements and sessions of the next few days. Will be doing last minute prep around my two sessions if you are interested in attending.

Wed 10:30 - 12:15
SHOW111 - How you deliver Mobile Applications the easy way with XPages and Web apps.
Will walk you through how to build both a 100% web app with the extension library and a hybrid app with PhoneGap.

Thursday 8:30 - 9:30
BP118 - Using Java to build Applications Fit for the enterprise
Will discuss and demonstrate how Java helps provide a scalable platform for developing your XPages applications.

Resource Reservations advice - Wrestling with free time

Chris Connor — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 03:57:10 -0500

Writing a booking front end using the extension library - the UI works really well and supports browser events for creation, deletion, moving etc.

The issue is "wrestling with free time". Not a lot of good information out there in terms of setting the various field values. In essence I am mailing a document to the room that is setup in the database. I then use the events to save updates / delete to the booking as required. This works well other than.....

The emails that are generated are not very configurable - infact the one on creation of the booking that is sent to the chair gives an error on opening the mail message - I think it is expecting to open a reservation in the actual mailfile instead of the resource reservation database.

Might be easiest to switch the mailing aspect of this off (I still want it to be "reserved" by the free time engine).

Been hunting around in the dark - anyone got any thoughts or advice?

Speaking at LS12 - my first Lotusphere session

Chris Connor — Tue, 6 Dec 2011 12:52:35 +0100

Delighted to say that I will be presenting two sessions at this years Lotusphere after having attended 3 others in "read only mode". Bit nervous but very excited. It follows several months working up to this point putting in sessions in European LUGs (Denmark and UK) and also other local events in the UK.

Going to be a lot of work between now and the 20th but hopefully it will be rewarding for me and more importantly for those who attend!

Flights need to be booked (probably Aer Lingus - do I ever learn anything from last year?), the ESTA (or whatever they are called - the forms that allow me into the country) need to be completed and a new pair of (industrial strength) drinking shoes need to be bought. The must be capable of propping me up at various bars for the whole week.

Oh yeah - before I forget the subjects are

1. XPages and Java - focussed around why I have used it and how it really benefits me in doing my job for clients
2. XPages and Mobile Web Applications

Themes that I have been running with for the year and plan to develop further for LS12 and beyond.

Looking forward to meeting the folks lucky enough to attend this year. Also look forward to the news and general interweb chatter that kicks off around the event too!

Turbo Charging your Legacy Notes apps with XPages relational access

Chris Connor — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 12:30:45 +0100

Now that we have our 8.5.3 environments ready thoughts turn to how do we use XPages to build better applications with the new tools available. I have been involved in a few situations lately where organisations are reviewing their application estate and asking how do we approach "modernising" them. The first cry from everyone is usually "XPages" but quite rightly IT departments are asking what is the best platform for THAT particular application in OUR organisation with OUR current skills. When reviewing the application estate the feedback has generally come back in the form of:-

1. Application works well - needs extending via a "web app" to browser or mobile.
2. Application needs to integrate into our Portal, Intranet, be made available on public Website etc.
3. Application functions badly due to the way it was deployed on the older Notes client

All of the above can be addressed by putting together an XPages "front end" or as in case 3 by rewriting the application to work better with XPages (dojo, jquery, modern web ui tools).

There are however a large number of applications (I am sure we have all seen them) that have underlying problems with the architecture. This usually comes down to two issues

1. Sheer numbers of documents.
2. Complex structure of relationships between data / documents.

I am thinking the huge timesheets database, enormous CRMs with huge numbers of documents and relationships with visits, callbacks etc etc.. Again we have all seen them....

This usually manifests itself in performance issues, applications that are difficult to change and maintain and even more difficult to leverage good reports from. We then see loads of views, loads of categorisation, lots of bloat / index issues, server struggling when a view is rebuilt, requests for reports where information is captured but stupid methods have to be employed to get it ...etc.. etc.

This is where the new XPages Relational Database Access tools come in. Now we can...

1. Use Domino security (readers fields, authors fields, acls) - these are easy to configure and change using the same methods that are in current support / operation with developers and the admin team.
2. Use Domino workflow eg a "main document " could have "related records" that are stored in a relational db somewhere and called for display at the appropriate point.
3. Get better reporting (always a pain as already mentioned). You can use standard reporting tools (Crystal reports etc) for building reports and even delegate more to business users.
4. Handle better volumes of "record" type data.
5. Kick off transactional processes that are in other systems (as well as your own table structure)
6. Build powerful database searches that incorporate a combination of Full Text and SQL queries.

Of course with all of that we can leverage the full benefits of a JSF based Java Web application server built around dojo UI components for cross platform mobile and web applications.

The opportunities are endless. We now have a true web application server and with XWork and further developments in the pipeline I am looking forward to LS12!

Anyone else able to share their own stories around this?

Oh yes - before I forget go to OpenNTF and download the Extension Library and install on 8.5.3. There is good visual material there to help you on your way!

Web Enabled Resource Reservations

Chris Connor — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 15:55:30 +0100

Currently evaluating some options around providing a custom web interface for Resource Reservations for booking rooms. The requirement also needs to build in some custom workflow / approval processes to provide for overriding bookings. Ideally I am looking for a nice Web user interface that is

1. Nice (Web 2.0 - I hate that expression) modern web experience
2. Works well on mobile devices
3. Built on XPages

Ideally I would like this to be based around dojo - although there is nothing I could find at this stage. I know there would not be too much effort to do this around jQuery as there are a plethora of nice looking calendar tools that use Web Services / XML / JSON or whatever for pushing data backwards and forwards. Paul Withers is also advised on some interesting stuff (from part of his stuff on the new XPages extension library book) from the extension library which takes the iNotes interface and makes it more available via xpages and web services. It has built in controls for events for creating entries, rescheduling etc - so looks interesting.... (Paul bribed sorry asked if I would reference the Excellent Extension Library Book - coming soon on amazon).

Another developer Toby Samples took the jQuery approach using "Full Calendar" - that also looks interesting. There has also been some work on the 8.5.3 template which I have yet to look through. I suspect though that the UI / customisation requirements may exclude that option....

Anyone else doing anything similar out there?

Simple Domino Internet Mail Monitoring

Chris Connor — Fri, 7 Oct 2011 12:11:23 +0100

Trying to reach out for some help. Won't even try to pretend that I am an expert Domino Admin (last course I did was a system admin II back in roughly 1996/1997 - how far can things have changed anyway?).

Cutting to the chase - I thought that this would be easy to do. Need to run adhoc queries on external internet emails sent such as.

1. How many mails were sent to domain @xyz.com
2. Which recpients in that domain
3. Which senders sent to that domain
4. How many mails were sent with the following subject line contents "Top Secret: xyz"
5. Again to who / by who

Fairly basic parameters running around date window and from/to and subject.

Now I know Domino is not great with high volumes of this kind of stuff and the initial look of the Tracking Request functionality does not really fit the bill (nor does the format of the data lend easy for exporting).

It strikes me that this must be asked all the time and is either

1. Part of the core product that needs configuring properly
2. Done somewhere else (such as a mail gateway) with reporting tools there
3. A 3rd party Domino tool to help

Anyone please care to help a struggling developer and share what they do?

XWork application server

Chris Connor — Mon, 3 Oct 2011 13:55:07 +0100

Thought I would write a few quick words as a consultant, developer and ISV using Domino / XPages and java / web technologies in general. Having sold applications for expenses / timesheets into organisations before I always viewed the market to be existing Domino customers - this opens things up somewhat moving forward. As mentioned before the "runs on lotus notes" badge that came with it has become an ever more difficult battle to fight. I am glad to say that now our applications run on a java web application server called "IBM XWork". This positions our solutions running on a tried and tested No SQL datastore with the abilities to work with relational data / other data sources too for integration purposes - a key feature of these solutions in the past (payroll integration etc).

Keen to see where else this leads us with changes moving forward. With other competitive open source Java Server platforms such as Tomcat, Glassfish (and many others) there are still many choices for ISVs out there. The XWork platform has its own value proposition though that I hope shines through. With some good case studies and some positive work in the community I am sure we can all help there.

Hoping this also puts some fresh impetus into working with the IBM local IBM sales teams - my targetting used to be based around "yellowspace" and as such did not really fit with what they do.

Hopefully the new initiative helps change things a bit. Keen to see what IBM has in mind around that.

XPages futures....relational access?

Chris Connor — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 01:45:27 -0500

Stephan Wissel raises and excellent point in his blog on what he thinks are options for the future of Domino and XPages with the inclusion of an in built relational data store. For many years now the NSF has been an excellent data structure but has had its known achillies heel which often led to poor performing applications or applications that did not scale. This led to issues around complex architectures, archiving, poor reporting outputs. For years we have asked the question "Will this work in Domino? Or is a relational platform a better choice". Now with the advent of open source and free web application software it is more important that this issue is addressed.

Paul Withers yesterday made some excellent points around the direction of "java" and what it means to the development community and the platform in terms of integration options and attracting new blood to the platform. Extending on this I see an opportunity for us to extend the offering that domino brings by including a data model that is industry standard and addresses the issues from the past.

Been doing some basic work on glassfish recently. As such I have been getting involved in JPA / EJB technologies for ORM (object relational mapping) and data access. It would be fantastic of somehow XPages could extend on this industry standard technology (either by webphere integration or "stealing" some parts from that stack) to give us a rock solid platform for doing ORM that covered mapping "Objects" to both "Documents" and relational data.

This may be pie in the sky - but I can see this approach really position XPages / Domino (or whatever it is called next) as a true industry leading platform with proven unique capabilities. Of course options would exist as well for integrating with other NoSQL platforms as well. This would also mean that the code we build (assets == money) will be available for the client (RCP) and our web application server (JSF).

Important times lie ahead for the platform - radical action is needed. We need to take advantage of the Eclipse / OSGI model that is available for the server and client and position the product as a true scalable platform that can address any business problem - irrespective of data constraints.

Any thoughts anyone?

XPages, XDesk, Java, Mobile, OSGI and a European Event

Chris Connor — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 09:32:37 +0100

Been a bit quiet here on the blog due to pressures of work but I thought I would take the chance to put together a quick posting that may be of interest to those working in XPages, mobile or Java.

Firstly I am delighted to announce that I will be speaking at DanNotes in Denmark on the 23rd and 24th November on XPages and mobile. Will be joining an excellent group of speakers in Niklas Heidloff and Ulrich Krause - it's quite far in the future but I have some good plans and projects to work with to build on my mobile presentations from earlier in the year.

This will help drive some new articles in the coming month on XPages and mobile. Also been doing some work with Java / OSGI on XPages as part of some XPages mentoring I have been doing for a client here in the UK - really all about building an "XPages infrastructure" for building and supporting multiple applications on the XPages platform. As well as this I plan to release (finally) a new version of XDesk that has been optimised for mobile webkit browsers - this is 99% ready to go and will be put into the OpenNTF catalog as well.

The blog should be a more active place in the coming 4 - 8 weeks! But first - off to la manga club in Spain for some much needed sun and rest....

XPages Rest Services, JSON and Mobile Dojo for iPad / iPhone at Lotusphere comes to you

Chris Connor — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 10:57:52 +0100

Its less than two days now and just about ready. Should be a good session. Will be covering Mobile development for Webkit browsers and will be showing

1. XDesk - how its being modified for iPad / iPhone with Mobile Dojo
2. How we use Rest services and Java to do searches, load data in XPages and post status updates within the Mobile Dojo framework within XDesk.
3. How the various components of Mobile Dojo work.
4. Demonstration of new features in later releases of Dojo.
5. How easy it is to develop, update and deploy to webkit devices (eg iPhone, iPad, Android, new BlackBerry devices including the playbook).

At the end of this you will have examples to pull apart and customise for your own needs. This means you should be able to "Webkit" enable databases quickly and easily with these tools.

Should be a good one - if you can make it register here. Looking forward to meeting up with some of the usual people.

Will also be doing labs on this and general XPages sessions.

Feel free to stop and have a chat at the labs, bar or anywhere for that matter....

Short video introducing XDesk for XPages - free issue tracking app on OpenNTF

Chris Connor — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 12:58:33 +0100

I am no Steven Spielberg or David Leedy... put together a short 2 minute video on my company youtube channel. Apologies for the quality on this in advance. At least it gives you some idea of what XDesk is and how it can help you.

Will be progressing this application in the coming few weeks - so stay tuned!!

Any questions on XDesk, mobilisation of applications using XPages or general XPages development please feel free to contact me through here...

Presenting at Lotusphere comes to you UK on April 13th 2011

Chris Connor — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 07:41:58 +0100

Looking forward to speaking at Lotusphere comes to you on April 13th 2011. There is a very exciting agenda with a good mix of business, strategy and technical content. I will be presenting a session on mobilising applications for the iPhone / iPad with XPages and OpenNTF mobile controls as it a subject I am doing a lot of work for right now. Will also be doing demonstrations and answering technical questions around this subject in the labs too. Feel free to drop by and ask any questions!

The keynote speaker for this event is Ed Brill which reflects the quality and profile of this event. The subjects will cover not only mobile and XPages but also areas such as project concorde / Lotus Live, Social Software, Real-time collaboration and a lot more. If you would like to attend or have any questions on my session (or any other session) feel free to ask.

Look forward to seeing you there!

Eclipse RCP Development Resources

Chris Connor — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 12:24:17 +0100

On my journeys I have found the following resources very useful - feel free to add more..

1. Redwiki - http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/ddwiki.nsf/xpViewCategories.xsp?lookupName=Redbooks%20Wiki%3A%20Creating%20Plugins%20for%20Lotus%20Notes%2C%20Sametime%2C%20and%20Symphony
2. Mikkel Heisterberg - http://www.lekkimworld.com/
3. Bob Balfe - http://www.balfes.net/
4. Ryan Baxter - http://ryanjbaxter.com/
5. Lars Vogel - http://www.vogella.de/
6. Eclipse - http://www.eclipse.org
7. Existing plugins from OpenNTF

The most challanging aspects that I found on this was getting an environment setup (can be hit or miss) and also dealing with threading. There are plenty of examples of how to on Mikkel and the redwiki.

I have chosen (for the moment) not to use the expeditor toolkit as I wanted more freedom over versions of eclipse and notes that I want to work with.

This is a very powerful platform - hope to see more adoption of it!

Can your email client do this? and ... Building Eclipse RCP Preference Pages

Chris Connor — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 21:26:06 +0100

Developed a few plugins now and find the functionality that this offers for customers using the eclipse platform very powerfull. Latest piece of interesting work has been on a tool that allows documents to be posted from any Notes database to a specifc database (in this case a knowledge management database based on XPages). Eclipse RCP has been used to extend the Notes Client so that any document can be selected (by right clicking the menu) as shown below

A link to the document is then document is then posted to the database after the user fills in a short description and categorises it as shown below

Of course when developing this I quickly found that the destination database needed to be configurable. This led me to the subject of preferences. Setting via an admin policy and then retrieving seemed fairly simple as highlighted in the redwiki on Eclipse plugins. An excellent article by Lars Vogel on http://www.vogella.de/articles/EclipsePreferences/article.html helped me build a simple preferences interface to help manage in a more visible way as shown below.

When all this stuff is so easily hooked together using Java there is so many possibilities for systems integration and process improvement all in one place.

So if you are not using Eclipse plugins you are not getting the most out of Notes! I urge you to get involved and start - there is so much you can do with the Notes Client.

So for the old question of "Notes? what does that do?" I like to say to people "Can your email client do this?" ......

.

xDesk v1.1 release on OpentNTF

Chris Connor — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 13:02:25 +0100

Just put a new version of xDesk onto OpenNTF. xDesk is a free issue tracking application running on xPages and now makes use of the OpenNTF mobile controls for iphone/ipad/ipod touch.

Timing was purely coincidental but the application has just been made "Featured Project of the Month" on OpenNTF.

Will be posting new releases to this in the coming months with features such as

1. Further mobilisation
2. Eclipse RCP integration
3. Graphing capabilities

Any questions or feedback (constructive) very much welcome!

Getting handle to XPages repeat control data in different places

Chris Connor — Fri, 4 Mar 2011 12:29:23 +0100

Needed this kind of functionality in at least a couple of occasions now. You have a view and to that view you bind a repeat control. You then tie a search to the view so you can display searched results in a repeat control. In many circumstances you will want to present further functionality based on the searched data set (perhaps an export to excel or a filtering series of checkboxes or ...well about anything).

The key is we need to get a hold of the repeat control, get the underlying data source (searched data - called by getModelData), then the documents "beneath" (from each row by using getRowData()). Well - it is fairly straight forward as below.

var temprows=getComponent("repeat1");

var modelData=temprows.getDataModel();

for(i=0; i < modelData.getRowCount() ; i++){

modelData.setRowIndex(i);

var xspViewEntry=modelData.getRowData();

var document=xspViewEntry.getDocument();

BeanPickerList.setArraylist(document.getItemValueString("Type"));

}

For your information "BeanPickerList" is just a simple ManagedBean that I manipulate in a few places in my application. But the idea is that you get a handle to the NotesDocument. From there you can do anything that you normally do in the Notes world...

XPages perspecitves on Designer

Chris Connor — Thu, 3 Mar 2011 13:03:30 +0100

First up I would like to add that I apologise for being a dumb #### and not realising this before. In my XPages work I try to organise things better by using Java where appropriate. I find things are tidier, easier to code (than SSJS either in libraries or direct on XPages) and there is better support with Eclipse (better type ahead, code completion etc etc). I tend to use SSJS and EL in basic circumstances and well java functionality is just plain easier to get from the Eclipse Java Editor....anyway....

But here comes the dumb #### bit. Switching perspectives between "Domino" and Java. I would spend so much of my day working between the two - back and forwards cursing. So I thought hey - why don't I just create a custom "XPages Java" perspective. To I opened the Java perspective, added the various views for applications, controls etc (that are traditionally available in designer), saved it and now I have a hybrid where I work from day by day doing XPages work.

So I can work doing all my Java stuff and if I need to find a field name, column name, view name, add fields to a form or whatever I can do it in one place. Even copying and pasting between Eclipse views in the one perspective (eg a field name from a form or view straight into your java code).

I know 8.5.3 is bringing more in this area - just thought I would blog this in the remote off chance someone was being as big a dumb #### as me.... I cannot believe I am so happy about this - perhaps I need to get a life...!

NotesIn9 video on Mobile Controls from OpenNTF

Chris Connor — Tue, 1 Mar 2011 15:54:59 +0100

David Leedy has kindly asked me to talk about some of my experiences using the OpenNTF mobile controls for XPages. So I have put together a short video around the concept of 5 steps to mobilizing your Notes and Domino applications using mobile controls and XPages.

In this video I show how a sample XPages application (in this case XDesk from OpenNTF) has been "mobilized" with this approach.

I will be extending this concept in the near future by releasing a guide / or "cheat sheet" (trademark David Leedy ;-) )and also be putting together some more articles around this as this is an area that I am doing a lot of work in.

Anyway - pop over to NotesIn9 to have a look!