Notes / Domino by Jesse Gallagher
New Release: XPages Jakarta EE 3.3.0 
By Jesse Gallagher | 12/23/24, 1:57 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
As part of finishing my holiday gift shopping, I published version 3.3.0 of the XPages Jakarta EE project today.
This release contains a number of bug fixes to do with asynchronous and scheduled tasks based on some edge-case and intermittent trouble I ran into while developing some apps with it. Additionally, it has some consistency fixes for the Jakarta NoSQL support - in particular, it improves mapping of object properties to columns, matching the item names case-insensitively and matching special fields like FIELD_CDATE to matching columns with formulas like @Created.
PSA: XPages CSS Changes in 14.0 FP3
By Jesse Gallagher | 12/17/24, 2:52 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
Fix Pack 3 for Domino 14.0 came out last week and, in addition to the usual spate of fixes you'd expect from an FP, it brought a potentially-significant and -breaking change to the way XPages handles style attributes for components. This is presumably in the interest of supporting the pathological strictures of Content-Security-Policy, but it applies whether or not you have taken any other steps to implement CSP.
The specific change is that the XPages renderers will now take the style attribute, externalize it to a class, and then make a <style> block for it.
Recent Open-Source Project Updates
By Jesse Gallagher | 9/7/24, 10:01 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
I've released a spate of open-source project updates recently, and I figured it'd be good to round up what's new. Most of them are utilitarian in nature - mostly fixes for things that crop up with Domino 14 and Java > 8 - but the first one is larger.
Pretty-Printing JSON in the (Desktop) Notes Client and Domino
By Jesse Gallagher | 7/29/24, 3:21 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
In the OpenNTF Discord (join if you haven't!), Daniel Nashed brought up a task he was facing: in the Notes client, writing pretty-printed JSON. LotusScript has its NotesJSON* classes that can process JSON in their stark way, but the stringify output is meant for machine reading and doesn't include whitespace and line breaks, making it ill-suited for things like configuration files or other things a human might read or edit.
Since the goal is to get it working in the full Notes client and not Nomad, Java is on the table, but Java - for dumb historical reasons - has no proper built-in JSON library. However, as of 12.something HCL shunted IBM Commons down to the global classpath in order to support the "share Java design elements between XPages and agents" feature. Among many other things, IBM Commons includes a JSON library that can suit.
I wrote a post almost a decade ago talking about this library and its limited nature, but it's nonetheless less limited than the LotusScript classes, and it's up to the task. There are a couple ways to go about this, depending on your needs, but for now I'll just cover the basic case here of "I have a string of JSON and want to format it".
XPages JEE 3.0
By Jesse Gallagher | 6/10/24, 1:29 PM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
Today, I uploaded the release version of 3.0.0 of the XPages Jakarta EE Support project. It's been proving stable in my use since the last beta, and so I think this is as good a time as any to release it properly.
XPages JEE 3.0 Beta 4
By Jesse Gallagher | 5/23/24, 10:43 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
Earlier today, I uploaded beta 4 of XPages JEE 3.0 to GitHub. I've been taking a slow approach to this release due to its "breaking changes" nature, but I think it's just about ready for release.
Domino 14
Like previous betas, this release requires Domino 14 (and Notes 14 for development), since it moves to a baseline of Jakarta EE 10, which in turn requires Java 11. Doing this let me get rid of some extra shim code that was needed to support both Domino 14 and previous versions, and also let me move to some newer language constructs. If you're interested in the sorts of things that the new versions of Java brought, check out the OpenNTF webinar from April, where I talked about just that.
Simplifying the Maven Build of the NSF File Server Project
By Jesse Gallagher | 4/11/24, 5:13 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
When working on NSF File Server project that I talked about the other day, I took a slightly-different tack as far as building it than I did in the past, and I think it's worth going over some of that in case it's useful for others.
Adding Code Coverage Reports To Domino-Container-Run Tests
By Jesse Gallagher | 3/12/24, 2:08 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
When you're writing test suites for your code, it can be very useful to use a tool to analyze the code coverage of your tests. While people can get a little obsessive about coverage percents, there's certainly no denying that it's helpful to know how much of your code is actually run when testing, and also being able to look down into the specifics of what is covered.
XPages JEE 2.15.0 and Plans for JEE 10 and 11
By Jesse Gallagher | 2/22/24, 1:09 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
Today, I released version 2.15.0 of the XPages Jakarta EE project. As is often the case lately, this version contains bug fixes but also a few notable features:
You can now specify Servlets in WEB-INF/web.xml (as opposed to just via the @WebServlet annotation. This is helpful for defining a Servlet when the actual implementation is in a JAR or when following non-annotation-based examples
You can now specify context-param values in WEB-INF/web.xml in the NSF and META-INF/web-fragment.xml in JAR design elements, which will be available to JSP, JSF, JAX-RS, @WebServlet-annotated Servlets, and web.xml-defined Servlets
Added @BooleanStorage annotation for NoSQL entities to define how boolean values are converted to note items
Added CRUD operations for calendar events to NoSQL, around a few new methods on Repository. This exposes some of the capabilities of NotesCalendar and can be used for, for example, providing an iCalendar feed based on a mail database. To go with that, XPages JEE also re-exports iCal4J as included in the Domino stack for NSF use, though this API is... not smooth
The first two here are focused around bringing NSFs more in line with "normal" Jakarta EE applications, while the latter are some nice improvements for the NoSQL driver. I hope to put the last one in particular to good use - for example, OpenNTF's site will be able to provide a calendar of webinars and other events that we can manage internally using a normal Notes calendar, and that sounds nice to me.
Notes/Domino 14 Fallout
By Jesse Gallagher | 12/18/23, 3:31 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
Notes and Domino 14 are out now and, as I discussed back in June the big deal for me is the move to Java 17. This also came with a refresh of the Eclipse innards, from Neon (circa 2016) to 2021-12 (circa, uh, 2021). The Eclipse update is welcome, but so far it's been less impactful than the Java update - at some point, I'll want to see if some of the current-era Eclipse plugins work here, but that's for the future.
In the mean time, there's a bunch to know, so let's get to it! I've broken this one down into "critical" and "less critical" sections, since this post will likely have a similar life to my target platform one.
XPages JEE 2.14.0
By Jesse Gallagher | 10/28/23, 4:39 PM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Oliver Busse
Today, I released version 2.14.0 of the XPages Jakarta EE Support project. As with the last few releases, this is primarily about bug fixes and compatibility as I prepare for the big switch in 3.0, but there are some notable, if small, feature additions.
New Tiny Project: Wink Chattiness Patch
By Jesse Gallagher | 9/19/23, 3:38 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
I've been using the Domino 14 betas for development for a while now, and one of the things that has driven me a little nuts is the way Wink spews a bunch of INFO-level logs to the server console when the XPages runtime initializes. You've probably seen it - this stuff:
It goes on for a while like that.
This isn't new with 14 as such - it's just that 14 now ships with Verse by default, and Verse uses the Wink distribution that came along with the Extension Library, and so now everyone sees this.
XPages JEE 2.13.0
By Jesse Gallagher | 7/24/23, 12:53 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
Today, I released version 2.13.0 of the XPages Jakarta EE Support project. Though there's not a single big banner feature, this one brings a number of good enhancements in a bunch of areas.
Kicking the Tires on Domino 14 and Java 17
By Jesse Gallagher | 6/5/23, 2:28 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
As promised, HCL launched the beta program for Domino 14 the other day. There's some neat stuff in there, but I still mostly care about the JVM update.
I quickly got to downloading the container image for this to see about making sure my projects work on it, particularly the XPages JEE Support project. As expected, I had a few hoops to jump through. I did some groundwork for this a while back, but there was some more to do. Before I get to some specifics, I'll mention that I put up a beta release of 2.13.0 that gets almost everything working, minus JSP.
Now, on to the notes and tips I've found so far.
XPages JEE 2.12.0: JNoSQL Views and PrimeFaces Support
By Jesse Gallagher | 5/29/23, 12:36 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
Last week, I put up version 2.12.0 of the XPages JEE Support project. Beyond the usual fit-and-finish bits here and there, there are two main improvements in this release.
Jakarta NoSQL Views
Jakarta Faces and PrimeFaces
The Loose Roadmap for XPages Jakarta EE Support
By Jesse Gallagher | 5/5/23, 1:23 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
At Engage, HCL officially announced Java 17 in Domino 14 (I'm sure they announced other things too, but I have my priorities). This will allow me to do a lot in pretty much all of my projects, but it's particularly pertinent to XPages JEE.
Currently, the project targets generally Jakarta EE 9, which came out in late 2020 and was "just" a switch from javax.* to jakarta.*, with no official new features. However, Jakarta EE 10 came out a year ago - in addition to bringing a raft of new features, it also bumped the minimum Java version to Java 11, pushing it outside of Domino's realm. Accordingly, I've had to hold off on a lot of major- and minor-version bumps in the XPages JEE project as new releases started being compiled for Java 11. Once V14 is out, though, I'll be able to move to the current JEE platform... at least until JEE 11 comes out next year and requires Java 21, anyway.
So I've been working on how I'm going to approach this, and what I'm thinking is that I'll do it in two phases: first, a final 2.x release that provides Java 17/Domino 14 compatibility for existing components, and then a new 3.x breaking-changes release to bring in Jakarta EE 10 components.
In Development: Containerized Builds in NSF ODP
By Jesse Gallagher | 5/2/23, 2:04 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
Most of my active development happens macOS-side - I'll periodically use Designer in Windows when necessary, but otherwise I'll jump through a tremendous number of hoops to keep things in the Mac realm. The biggest example of this is the NSF ODP Tooling, born from my annoyance with syncing ODPs in Designer and expanded to add some pleasantries for working with ODPs directly in normal Eclipse.
Over the last few years, though, the process of compiling NSFs on macOS has gotten kind of... melty. Apple's progressive locking-down of traditional native loading mechanisms and the general weirdness of the Notes package and its embedded non-JDK JVM have made things get a little weird. I always end up with a configuration that can work, but it's rough going for sure.
XPages JEE 2.11.0 and the Javadoc Provider
By Jesse Gallagher | 4/21/23, 4:11 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
Yesterday, I put two releases up on OpenNTF, and I figure it'd be worth mentioning them here.
The first is a new version of the XPages Jakarta EE Support project. As with the last few, this one is mostly iterative, focusing on consolidation and bug fixes, but it added a couple neat features.
The second one is a new project, the XPages Javadoc Provider. This is a teeny-tiny project, though, not even containing any Java code.
Quick Tip: Stashing Log Files From Domino Testcontainers
By Jesse Gallagher | 3/29/23, 3:55 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
I've been doing a little future-proofing in the XPages Jakarta EE project lately and bumped against a common pitfall in my test setup: since I create a fresh Domino Testcontainer with each run, diagnostic information like the XPages log files are destroyed at the end of each test-suite execution.
Moving Relative Date Text Client-Side
By Jesse Gallagher | 3/13/23, 3:11 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
One of my main goals in the slow-moving OpenNTF home-page revamp project I'm doing (which I recently moved to a public repo, by the way) is to, like on this blog, keep things extremely simple. There's almost no JavaScript - just Hotwire Turbo so far - and the UI is done with very-low-key JSP pages and tags.
XAgents to Jakarta REST Services
By Jesse Gallagher | 2/6/23, 2:03 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Oliver Busse
For a good long time now, XAgents have been one of the common ways to do non-HTML output in an XPages environment - JSON, mostly. I think the technique was codified and the term coined by Stephan Wissel back in 2008 and the idea has been the same since.
Effectively, an XAgent lets you write a Servlet but with a bit more scaffolding. Though XPages has a path to use Servlets officially, that method is more out-of-the-way than XAgents and doesn't (without further hoop jumping) give you some niceties like sessionAsSigner.
XPages Jakarta EE 2.9.0 and Next Steps
By Jesse Gallagher | 11/22/22, 4:54 PM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Oliver Busse
Keeping with my productive week off, today I release version 2.9.0 of the XPages Jakarta EE Support project. Similar to the previous release, this one contains new features primarily related to Jakarta NoSQL, but also has some improvements for JSF and a bunch of bug fixes and compatibility improvements.
More Open-Source Updates for Notes/Domino 12.0.2
By Jesse Gallagher | 11/21/22, 12:39 PM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
The other day, I talked about some changes/workarounds for Notes/Domino 12.0.2. Today, I made a few updates to some of the open-source projects I maintain, including another update to the generate-domino-update-site Maven plugin.
Notes/Domino 12.0.2 Fallout
By Jesse Gallagher | 11/18/22, 5:12 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
Notes and Domino 12.0.2 came out today. Generally, there are some neat features in development and on the server, but there are also a couple things you may run into depending on your workflow and installation type.
The Myriad Idioms For Finding Implementations In Java
By Jesse Gallagher | 10/21/22, 7:35 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
A few years ago, I wrote a post about Java service location, which covered things like META-INF/services and OSGI extensions. Today, I'd like to discuss a similar concept: code in a top-level API that finds a specific implementation. For reasons that will become clear shortly, I'll call this the "FactoryFinder pattern".
Upcoming Sessions at CollabSphere 2022
By Jesse Gallagher | 10/11/22, 1:09 PM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Oliver Busse
It's CollabSphere time again, and I'm delighted to be involved in a few sessions this time. Since I just very recently did an OpenNTF webinar covering the Jakarta EE Support project, these sessions take the form of roundtables I'm helping lead.
Jakarta NoSQL Driver for Keep
By Jesse Gallagher | 10/10/22, 2:24 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
In what has surreptitiously turned into something of a series, I followed up my recent tinkering with Jakarta NoSQL, the AppDev Pack, and Keycloak with doing something similar with Keep.
Keep, like the AppDev Pack's Proton task, provides a remote API for Domino data. It differs from the ADP in a couple notable ways:
Jakarta NoSQL Driver for the AppDev Pack, Part 2
By Jesse Gallagher | 9/27/22, 10:00 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
In my last post, I talked about how I implemented a partial Jakarta NoSQL driver using the AppDev Pack as a back end instead of the Notes.jar classes used by the primary implementation. Though the limitations in the ADP mean that it lacks a number of useful features compared to the primary one, it was still an interesting experiment and has the nice side effect of working with essentially any Java app server and Java version 8 or above.
Beyond the Proton API calls, the driver brought up the interesting topic of handling authentication. Proton has three ways of working in this regard:
Anonymous, which is what you might expect based on how that works elsewhere in Domino. This is easy but not particularly useful except in specific circumstances.
Client certificate authentication, where you create a TLS keychain for a given user and associate it with a Directory user (e.g. CN=My Proton App/O=MyOrg), and then your app performs all operations as that user. This is basically like if you ran a remote app with NRPC using a client Notes ID.
Act-as-User, which builds on the above authentication by configuring an OAuth broker service that can hand out OIDC tokens on behalf of named users. This is sort of like server-to-server communication with the "Trusted Servers" config field in the server doc, but different in key ways.
Jakarta NoSQL Driver for the AppDev Pack, Part 1
By Jesse Gallagher | 9/12/22, 3:18 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
Though the bulk of the work I've been doing for the XPages Jakarta EE project is to bring JEE technologies to Domino, the NoSQL driver has been designed to lead a double life: it works in an XPages context, but it's written to not have any XPages dependencies. One reason for this is that I want it to be usable if you use, for example, the Open Liberty runtime project to side-car apps on a Domino server but still use Notes.jar for data access.
Another reason for its organization, though, is that I intended for the driver to be portable across implementations. The driver itself is split into a main bundle and a ".lsxbe" implementation bundle. My original thought was to make that ready for a JNX or Domino JNA implementation, but it's pretty flexible.
XPages Jakarta EE In Practice Slides and Video
By Jesse Gallagher | 8/18/22, 1:03 PM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Oliver Busse
Earlier today, I presented for OpenNTF's webinar series on the topic of the XPages Jakarta EE Support project. I felt like it went pretty well, and the video and slides are up now.