HTML5 introduces Web Notifications API which “allows alerting the user outside the context of a web page of an occurrence, such as the delivery of email“. This opens up quite a few possibilities for developers like alerting a user when a document needs approval irrespective of the XPage he is currently on. In this example I will use the Extension Library control Remote Service to poll a view to check if any documents require approval and if yes then show notification to user.

Validators allows you to validate wide variety of field values for email, IP address, URL, ISBN and credit card (AMEX, Diners, Discover, Master and VISA) using a simple Java class. Internally Validators uses Apache Commons Validator. This technique was originally described in this blog: http://www.pipalia.co.uk/xpages-2/using-validator-property-to-keep-all-your-validations-in-a-single-java-class/.

It is very easy to start developing your first XPages application in the same design template or database where your existing forms and views resides. In this short article we will see why is not a good idea and I will demonstrate this with a simple example.