I got a question today from someone who looked at the slides that Kathy Brown and I did from IBM Connect”
while reading your presentation XPages: No experience Needed I noticed the your screenshot of the layout control differs from what is displayed here in designer.
we downloaded openntfextensions (ExtensionLibraryOpenNTF-853.20121022-1354) and installed ’em (test/-developer-server and developer-client). everything went fine and layout control was just like shown in your presentation.dragging the layout control to the panel surface opened up the config dialog. we did some playing around but because of official ibm support for upgrade pack 1 we decided to jump on the upgrade pack train and give it a try. but it seems as if upgrade pack 1 is a little bit outdated in comparrison to openntfextensions – e.g. the layout control doesn’t show a config dialog.would installing upgrade-pack 2 improove things and also update extensions controls like layout or do we have to stick with upgrade pack 1 and live with it?
perhaps you can help and give us a short hint. thanks in advance.
Here’s my personal opinion of Upgrade Pack vs. Ext. Library.
Always use Ext. Library.
Yes – Upgrade Pack is “Supported” by IBM but I honestly don’t know what that means. Sure you can make a PMR but I’m not aware of IBM providing hotfixes for bug fixes for the upgrade pack. Honestly I’m not personally aware that there will be an Upgrade Pack 2. I THINK there’s an “Upgrade Pack 2” that’s specific to Traveler. I don’t know of a second Upgrade Pack for the Ext. Library stuff for Domino 8.5.3. I think that the path is to go Domino 9 which pretty much has it built in. I could be wrong on those points though.
But I do know that even though Ext. Library “is not supported”, it has been getting fairly regular bug fixes and updates. I believe Upgrade Pack 1 came out late 2011. Just checking the OpenNTF project I can see that there were 7 releases of Ext. Library since then. Most of those releases are bug fixes I think. So to me, I think Ext. Library has much better real support.
Now I’m a developer at a private company, and we put Ext. Library on all our servers. Honestly I’ve never downloaded or touched Upgrade Pack 1. Granted, at my company I have the luxury of working with Declan Lynch, a top Domino admin. But even so, I can’t imagine a situation where I would lean towards Update Pack 1.
Now there is more “risk” with Ext. library in some cases. At one point the Ext. Library changed some names and that might have caused some people some problems. We use Ext. Library heavily and I don’t think we were heavily impacted by that. But even though something got changed, so what? Apple, and Microsoft, and Google change “supported” things all the time. So I don’t see a big difference here.
I hear from friends and others that they use Upgrade Pack 1 because “customers require support”. I just don’t know what that support really means. What’s sillier is that some of the same people that run Upgrade Pack 1 for IBM support also ask how to install the experimental pieces from Ext. Library for Relational Database support etc… That makes no sense to me. Now they’re asking to run unsupported software in and unsuported configuration.
Domino 9.0 is being released on the 21st it seems. That has most of the core Ext. Library built in. My recommendation would be to move to that as soon as possible. I know we are. I believe there will then be an Ext. Library specific to 9.0 but that’s just a guess. I’m anxious to hear the Ext. Library plans for 9.0 myself.
It was funny when Kathy and I did that presentation. She used Upgrade Pack 1 because as a consultant that’s more desirable to her. I was on Ext. Library and we did see some issue as I had bug fixes that she did not. Was a bit of a pain really. But don’t tell her that! haha
I’m blogging this in case anyone wants to comment and you can get more opinions.
Hope this helps.
Dave