Author: David Leedy

Categories
AngularJS

Thinking of AngularJS? Maybe it’s not all that and a bag of chips after all.

For a little while I’ve been hearing from some respected friends that basically “AngularJS is Awesome”.  I’ve sat in some presentations…  seen webinars.. had Skype chats…. etc.  So it’s on my “Interest List” but I’ve not devoted any time yet to try anything about.  As I write this I literally know almost nothing about AngularJS from a practical stand point.

A while back though I did look for AngularJS information.  Specifically I wanted to hear negative opinions about it.  I wanted something to offset a lot of the Angular cheerleading that seems to dominate the conversation.  Because of course there is no one perfect technology.  Look at me – I love working with XPages but if you want a list of everything that sucks eggs about it I’d be happy to discuss that as well.  It’s good to have perspective on things.

At the time I really didn’t find much negative about Angular.  I didn’t spend a lot of time on it and my Google-Fu is usually pretty weak to begin with but I thought that odd.

So today I came across this article today that I wanted to share:

Why you should not use AngularJS

I found this article really interesting.  Is it biased or even accurate?  I’ve no idea.  But I wanted to share this for anyone like me who might have been hearing all this positive vibes about Angular and wanted some perspective.

 

Categories
XPages

Thank goodness for IBM Domino and XPages

So Declan sent me this article  the other day.  Something from JSFCentral about the development of the website for a “Major” insurance company.  Really not much to it but what was rather interesting was the tools that they needed to build this website.

  • Dev Platform
    Eclipse, Java 6, Maven 3
  • UI
    MyFaces 2, Facelets, Richfaces3 and Tomahawk
  • Backbone
    Spring 3 framework
  • Database
    Hibernate, String JDBC, DB2, Oracle
  • Other
    Spring Integration, MongoDB, JAX-RS, AXIS, Dojo, jQuery, Freemarker, Blaze rules engine, Drools, Apache, OBM MQ Series
  • Deployment Platform
    JBoss AS5, Tangosol Cache Server

I wasn’t sure if I should say “Wow!” or “WTF?”  I admit that I don’t know what half these tools even are but dang that’s a lot of parts for a website. It’s not even Facebook or Twitter.  It’s “only” getting 80,000 hits a day which just doesn’t seem like a lot for the amount of tools and work a team of 35 people put into this.

I’m not suggesting that Domino and XPages could be used to built this site. Maybe it can and maybe it can’t. There’s not enough information to even guess at that.  But if this is the norm of non XPages websites it sure does make me appreciate what XPages gives us out of the box to develop applications and how easy it is to deploy any applications on the Domino servers.

Now I’m all for embracing and learning non Domino web techniques – but looking at that list I wouldn’t even know where to start.

There’s a lot of things I don’t like about Domino and XPages.  There’s just so many things that should be better. But I think for the next several days at least, I’ll just focus on all the good things that I do like about the platform.

🙂

 

UPDATE:  Vince had an interesting followup post here.

Categories
Notes In 9 Podcast XPages

NotesIn9 176: Categorizing Repeat Controls

In this show, brand new contributor, Bill Fox comes on to give a really interesting demo on Categorizing Repeat Controls.  He’ll show repeat controls with 1, 2 and 3 levels of categorization.  There’s a lot of other techniques in here as well. He’ll use custom controls with custom properties, View Navigators, Computed CSS stlyes and more.

Hope you like it!

Categories
Ext. Library Learning XPages Notes In 9 XPages

NotesIn9 175: XPages Extension Library goes Responsive!

I’m really excited about today’s brand new contributor.  Today we welcome Brian Gleeson to the show.  I’ve had many great contributors to the show over the years but Brian is the very first member of the XPages Development team to come on with a demonstration.  That’s been on my NotesIn9 “bucket list” for long time.  I feel like I’ve finally gone “legit”. haha

Anyway Brian, who is a key member behind the Ext. Library on OpenNTF, is going to give use a great demo on the new responsive controls from the latest edition of the Ext. Library. There’s actually a bunch of new features in the Ext. Library but the responsive controls alone are very cool.

Hope you like it!

Categories
Notes In 9 XPages

NotesIn9 174: Getting Started with Custom Renderers

In this show Oliver Busse returns with a great show on how to get started with Custom Renderers.

His twitter is @zeromancer1972 and he can be found at http://oliverbusse.de

 

Categories
Community

Need an XPages/Web Developer Job?

I just saw this come across my email.

http://www.hersheyjobs.com/jobs/descriptions/programmer-analyst-hershey-pennsylvania-job-1-5225766

I basically interviewed for this job back in 2008/2009ish.  It is in a great facility right next to the amusement parks “Hershey Park” and “Chocolate World”.  They seem to do a lot of neat things.  At the time I did not get the job – supposedly I came in 2nd due to my lack of web experience. While that was a bit of a blow back then it worked out for the best for had I gotten that job I would have missed out on my current dream job.

But anyway – I wanted to just through this out there in case anyone is interested.  I don’t know any of the people involved so I don’t have any more information other then this link.

As an added bonus this is in Hershey Pa so you’d be very near to me.  Hmm maybe that’s not a bonus.

🙂

Categories
Java XPages

NotesIn9 173: Getting Started with Servlets

This is one of those shows that I think is really important.  

Today we welcome Eric McCormick, a new contributor and IBM Champion, to the show.  Eric did a geat demo showing us how to get started using Java to make Servlets inside our XPages Applications.  This opens a lot of doors to expose your data to applications outside of the Domino server.

Eric’s Blog

Note: This show doesn’t have great audio.  My headset stopped working for some reason and also Eric recorded the show in several takes I think.  I tried to clean up what I could – hopefully it’s not a huge problem.

Categories
Java Podcast XPages

NotesIn9 172: XPages Java Debugging

In this show XPages “Professor” and IBM Champion, Mr. Paul Withers returns for an in depth look at how to use the Java Debugger to step through the Java code in your XPages applications.  In the beginning and end of the show he’ll also talk about OpenLog which was originally an AMAZING project from Julian Robichaux that Paul has enhanced for the XPages world.

This show finally sees a slightly different format that I’ve been wanting to do for a while. We did this demo via Gotomeeting so I was able to talk to Paul and ask some questions throughout the demo.  I’m hoping this will be a benefit for certain topics and maybe even certain speakers – especially new ones that might not feel comfortable in doing a demo solo.  So really there should be no more excuses. 🙂

Let me know what you think!

Thanks

Dave

Categories
Community

And now we take a moment to eat…

This Sunday is the International Food Festival at my kids school.

For the third year in a row I’ll be dusting off my crack BBQ team and we will be manning a table of smoked Pulled Pork, Brisket, Burnt Ends, and our new item Bacon Tater Bombs.

It’s always a fun event.  We sold out the first year then last year I doubled the amount we made and sold out twice as fast.  This year I’m bringing enough there’s no way we’re selling out.  I think at least.  🙂

Anyway if anyone is in the local area please feel free to stop by for some BBQ and International offerings. They even have a ton of desserts.

This year my wife made a new “Pub Style” menu with the help of her laser engraver.  Yep – we go all out for this event. 🙂

IMG_2475

 

Categories
Bluemix

NotesIn9 171: IBM Bluemix Text to Speech

This show will feature our very first, but definitely not our last, look at IBM Bluemix.  Bluemix is a Platform as a Service solution from IBM that gives you tools to quickly build web and mobile applications. IBM is even adding XPages capability and the original NoSQL database, Domino .nsf , capability to Bluemix.

In today’s show Mark Roden comes on to show how you can connect with IBM Watson and harness it’s Text to Speech capability.  It’s very cool.

Links:

Bluemix

http://www.bluemix.net

5 new IBM Watson services

https://developer.ibm.com/watson/blog/2015/02/04/new-watson-services-available

Text To Speech demo

http://text-to-speech-demo.mybluemix.net/

Getting started with Text to speech 

http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/doc/text-to-speech/