by Paul Withers
A Possible Role For XPages 
By Paul Withers | 8/16/19 8:19 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger
A comment from Mark Maden on my recent blog "Thoughts on the Problem of XPages" prompted me about a potential area XPages could add value for the future. One of the strengths of XPages from the start has been flexible reporting.
How Do I Use XXXX Java / JavaScript in XPages?
By Paul Withers | 8/16/19 12:52 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger
A common request seems to be how do I use XXXX Java or JavaScript project in XPages. One of the strengths of XPages was that it made the approaches more standard. So the answer is often less an XPages question, and more a generic web development question. There are a few caveats, but many of those are standard for web development.
Thoughts on the Problem of XPages
By Paul Withers | 8/14/19 8:25 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger
Jesse Gallagher posted a thoughtful blog about the challenges for the way forward with XPages. It's a challenge I've had a number of discussions around, many of which are ongoing. The reason there's not a simple solution - throw whatever resources are required into XPages - is that it simply doesn't make business sense.
Modernising Domino Applications: Technical Deep Dive Part Three
By Paul Withers | 7/25/19 3:30 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger
In part one we covered Notes Client and XPages. In part two we covered Domino Mobile Apps. Technically, with both the previous parts we’ve covered interacting with a Domino application via a REST service. That’s nothing new – a LotusScript agent could have been a poor man’s REST service endpoint.
Modernising Domino Applications: Technical Dive
By Paul Withers | 5/20/19 8:19 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse
Last week I did a session on modernising Domino and XPages applications. Filling an hour seemed daunting when the session was accepted. So I went to the Oxford English Dictionary definition of modernisation:
The process of adapting something to modern needs or habits
Engage 2019 Summary
By Paul Withers | 5/19/19 6:31 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse
Historically Engage has been shortly after a major conference in US, so it’s been an opportunity to catch up on sessions missed there. This year it followed the Factory Tour by a few months. Unfortunately for me, most of the key products sessions conflicted with sessions I was delivering or preparation.
Preparing for HCL's Domino: What Managers and Technical Need To Know
By Paul Withers | 5/3/19 3:46 AM | - | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
With Engage around the corner and the acquisition of Domino, Connections and more expected to close soon after, followed by build up to Domino V11 it’s a good time to assess readiness for the future. A few facts are clear:
The pace of delivery of new features for Domino has increased significantly.
That pace shows no sign of slowing after HCL closes the deal.
HCL is committed to taking Domino into new markets and opportunities.
The strategic direction for application development on the platform is evolving.
Customers need to evolve to consider the needs / requirements for their strategies and their technical teams.
Extended XPages Extension Library Demo Database (a.k.a node-demo.nsf)
By Paul Withers | 4/18/19 12:39 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger
With the App Dev Pack available on Windows and IAM server out of beta, HCL and IBM have done the work to go beyond the anonymous access to Domino data from Node.js. And with Engage around the corner, no doubt all speakers are thinking about demos, if they haven’t started doing them already.
Preventing “Build Automatically” Via Policy
By Paul Withers | 3/13/19 9:06 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger
As one of the first steps in XPages training I cover making configuration and settings changes to Domino Designer to optimise your experience. One of those is switching off Build Automatically. Unless your day-to-day ID only has Editor or below access to applications, sooner or later having Build Automatically enabled will cause problems.
XPages Partial Refresh and Server-Wide Xsp Properties
By Paul Withers | 2/15/19 8:20 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger
A new IBM technote has been released for XPages Partial Refresh Throwing CLFAD* Errors. As suspected, the cause was tightening up validation and, instead of falling back to reloading the page, it throws an error. I remember in 8.5.1 a similar issue where passing an error object to some logging started throwing an error because of greater validation.
OpenNTF Snippets - Investigating The Design
By Paul Withers | 2/11/19 7:06 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse
As you’ve hopefully seen, we’ve relaunched XSnippets as OpenNTF Snippets. There are quite a few changes, some decisions made that are less than traditional, but driven by some key factors. Indeed some may seem bad practice and are certainly not what may be made for other applications. But the driving force is a deep understanding of the application and its administrators.
Domino 10.0.1 on Docker Setup Video
By Paul Withers | 1/15/19 2:21 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse
I’ve created the first in a set of videos about setting up Domino on Docker for development from Notes Client, XPages and Node.js / Node-RED
Installing ODA Into DDE Without Download
By Paul Withers | 1/4/19 2:52 PM | - | Added by Oliver Busse
Just before Christmas Jesse Gallagher added directory download support to OpenNTF’s p2 Repository Browser. This means projects like OpenNTF Domino API can be installed into Domino Designer directly from a URL rather than going to OpenNTF and manually downloading the relevant release. It also means it’s possible to get the latest snapshot code as well.
Whither XPages?
By Paul Withers | 11/8/18 8:55 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse
Some years ago I wrote a blog post called “Whither the Notes Client”. At the time (2012) XPages was flourishing, the Notes browser plugin (subsequently ICAA) was being launched, Symphony was being stopped and the IBM-specific enhancements routed back to Apache OpenOffice and iNotes was being integrated into what is now Connections Cloud.
Restricting Access to XPages
By Paul Withers | 9/24/18 5:37 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse
At ICON UK I was talking to another developer about methods of restricting access to data in XPages. Historically, when I started with XPages my approach was probably one most people use, ACL-driven – readers fields, roles and the “acl” property on an XPage.
Navigators and RepeatTreeNodes - A Brain Dump
By Paul Withers | 4/26/18 9:02 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger
In an application I was extending, I wanted to use a Navigator component that worked very dynamically. It was to replace nested repeat controls. The Navigator has a RepeatTreeNode and it seemed a reasonable approach to nest them.
Scheduling XPages Code - Video and Addendum
By Paul Withers | 4/9/18 12:13 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger
Following the blog posts and the demo, which took some time, I’ve finally created a video on my YouTube channel, which you can also access below. It’s quite a long video but that’s because I go through all that I’ve gone through in the blog posts and more.
Scheduling XPages Code - Part Six
By Paul Withers | 4/4/18 1:06 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger
So far we’ve covered using Node-RED triggering REST services which could be SmartNSF routes, XAgents or custom Java REST services in OSGi plugins – and indeed any REST endpoints, on Domino or beyond. Apart from re-using XPages code, there’s no real advantage so far over LotusScript or Java agents.
Scheduling XPages Code - Part Five
By Paul Withers | 4/3/18 2:45 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger
n the previous part we used a basic XAgent and a SmartNSF custom route to trigger Xots tasks. But both still required setting up a Xots task as a specific Java class. As long as all we’re wanting to do is process a REST service and send a basic response, there are more things we can do to make it even easier.
Encryption in XPages: Remember to Set Xsp Properties
By Paul Withers | 3/14/18 10:07 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger
Regardless of recent announcements, XPages is still my preferred option for standalone rapid application web development. Once an appropriate level of understanding of the lifecycle is gained, there’s a comfortable level of logic in how it works.
Domino REST Service Plugins and Pre-Loading Caches
By Paul Withers | 3/5/18 5:07 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse
Last week I had an email from Mat Newman passing on a query for a REST servlet plugin. The person was noting that when sending a tell http osgi ss command to the server, the plugin was showing as “<<LAZY>>” and only changed to “<<ACTIVE>>” after the first call, when the code in the Activator runs.
Scheduling XPages Code - Part Two
By Paul Withers | 1/23/18 8:36 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger
The firs part I’ll cover is the scheduler – Node-RED. Many developers may not be familiar with it, but for more on why I think it’s a good fit, see the previous part of the series. The best place to get started is the Getting Started part of the Node-RED site. Node-RED, as its name implies, is a NodeJS application.
Scheduling XPages / OSGi Plugin Code - Part One
By Paul Withers | 1/11/18 7:57 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger
Before Christmas I blogged a teaser about running Xots tasks scheduled. Various demos have been constructed and a video will be coming, but I decided to blog about the components I would recommend to a customer. This is very much a modular approach with a lot of BYO components. But therein lies its strength, in my opinion.
Update on Scheduled Xots / "Designer Lite Plugin"
By Paul Withers | 12/11/17 3:02 PM | - | Added by Oliver Busse
Some years ago I developed an XPages application that heavily used ODA. In fact, it was the first I used Xots in. At the time, I needed a scheduled agent to send email reminders. I was frustrated that the only option if I wanted code in the NSF was a Java agent, which required me to add a jar file of ODA into the Java agent and copy some utility methods from my XPages code across to the agent.
Watson Developer Cloud Java SDK XPages Library
By Paul Withers | 12/1/17 7:34 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger
Recently I’ve been digging into the Watson Conversation APIs. With Java being my language of choice, the natural starting point was the Watson Brewery demo which integrates with Watson Workspace. This in itself was a learning experience as I finally stepped beyond the world of Eclipse to use IntellJ IDEA, as mentioned in the ReadMe.
Domino and Jar Files
By Paul Withers | 11/28/17 10:49 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger
Those of us who have been working with Domino and Java for some time know that one of the big strengths over LotusScript is the host of standard Java libraries that can be utilised. If you want better string or number handling etc, you have Apache Commons libraries. If you want Excel export, you have Apache POI.
Lessons in Optimising Performance
By Paul Withers | 9/24/17 7:05 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse
Over the last few months I’ve been involved with an application that has needed quite considerable optimisation and architectural modification. A few weeks ago I published a blog post about aspects of developing for performance and then followed up with a discussion about performance and Domino.
Big News for Domino, Connections and OpenNTF
By Paul Withers | 9/15/17 2:35 PM | - | Added by Oliver Busse
There are signs you can tell summer is over. For us in the northern hemisphere, the weather starts feeling chillier (although it’s been very changeable in UK most of the “summer”). And things start ramping up as people get back from holidays and Q3 comes to an end.
Notes, Domino, The Cloud and Performance
By Paul Withers | 8/24/17 9:44 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse
Over the last month or so, I’ve been working on an application that pushes performance quite a bit. Last week I published a blog post about aspects of developing for performance. I’ll be writing a future blog post (maybe more than one) on the approaches I’ve taken for performance. But in this blog post I want to take a step back and discuss why I had to address performance, even after quite a bit of optimisation from the initial development.
Dojox Charting Update - Part Two
By Paul Withers | 8/10/17 12:21 PM | - | Added by Oliver Busse
First of all, with the demo database, there are a couple of basic, standard changes. The first is that I’m using the XPages extension library, so that’s enabled in the Xsp Properties. That’s used for the Java code, to leverage the ExtLibUtil class to give easy access to standard XPages objects and virtually every Java XPages developer will be using ExtLibUtil.