Category: XPages

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Day Job XPages

I love what I do, and what I do is XPages

So I’m sitting here in Midway airport in Chicago.  Kinda bored really so I thought I’d throw out some random crappy post because really, there’s probably not enough of those on the Internet.

I’ve been rather busy recently, traveling to Anaheim, Washington D.C, Las Vegas, Orlando, Chicago, and I’m shortly going back to Las Vegas.

Why am I doing all this travel?  For my day job, and let me tell you I have the best job in the world.  I get to work with completely awesome people like Mike McGarel and Devin Olsen. I’ve got the best manager in the world in Declan “Super Tech” Lynch and above him is John Roling, an awesome PHB! Our company does some incredible things, but that’s for another post I think.

Our development platform of choice is XPages.  Why?  Because it works and works well.  We literally run out business on applications developed with XPages. We can and will use other tech when appropriate of course.  We’re not blinded by XPages. But for the most part it’s been clearly the best tool for our needs.

My part of this and the reason for my heavy travel of late is I’m building Inventory tracking applications.  I’m still using the Notes client a bit but that’s going away to be replaced with XPages only functionality. I big piece of this are screens specifically designed for iPad.  I have a blue tooth scanner that works great and it’s used to track inventory and assist is in shipping and receiving operations.  I’m doing a ton of mobile development – not all of it great yet as I feel my way through things like mobile controls, bootstrap, etc.  I have a lot of people using this app and a lot on iPads. So far they seem really happy and we’ve tracked and shipped a LOT of material. Yay!

Let me just say that putting my core business logic inside Java Beans has been an absolute life saver. But we’ll talk about that later.

So I’ve been traveling to not only train various locations in using these applications but also learn about how each location is different.  What their needs are… what works for them… what doesn’t. It’s been great though I am looking forward to just being home and getting back into development.

Outside of the day job the extra travel has prevented me from going to IamLUG and I probably will pass on MWlug. I do want to get back to the Lugs but want to hang with the family as much as possible right now.

On the NotesIn9 front – this has slowed down the shows of course.  It’s kinda been a problem since last year.  The end of the DriveTo99 then IBM Connect then the day job stuff has created a backlog.  So it’s taking me a long time to get shows from contributors out.  I’ve never had that kind of delay before and I do feel bad about it.  I think I still have 2-3 shows in the queue from Brad Balassaitis and Paul Withers to get out and then I THINK I’m caught up but need to go through all my dropbox directories to make sure I’m not missing anything.  So hopefully Ni9 will pickup in a bit after this last scheduled trip in a couple weeks.

Next week I’m doing an OpenNTF webinar with Marky Roden.  I’m really looking forward to it but need to finish up what I want to talk about and demo.  It’s a “Getting Started” topic so it’s geared for beginners, but maybe there will be something intermediates might have missed.

So that’s my story.  Oh yeah…  I did get a Chicago HotDog

Oh and before I sign off I do want to give a huge shootout to Jesse Gallagher from iknowsomeguys.com who’s helping me with a pet project.  Don’t miss his blog at http://frostillic.us

Great… looks like the plane is a bit late.  Sadly it’s too noisy to do a NotesIn9.

So yeah, I love what I do, and what I do is XPages!

Have a great weekend everyone!

 

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Java Notes In 9 Podcast XPages

NotesIn9 114: Using Wrappers with XPages

In this show yet another NEW contributor comes on to share content with the community.  Today, Stephan Wissel, IBMer and blogger at wissel.net comes on the show for a discussion on a programming design pattern called “Facade” and how you might want to use this in your XPages development.

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Mobile Notes In 9 XPages

NotesIn9 113: Learning to use XPages Mobile Controls

In this show NotesIn9 not only gets a SUPER new contributor, but it also gets it’s first Nerd Girl!  In today’s show Kathy Brown comes on to do a demo on using the XPages Mobile controls from the Extension Library / Update Pack 1.  These controls are also built into Domino 9.0.

In the demo she uses Designer to show you how to get started building a mobile app with the XPages Mobile Controls.

 

I hope you like it.

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Mobile Notes In 9 Podcast XPages

NotesIn9 112: XPages Mobile Controls Part 3

In this show Peter Presnell returns to conclude his 3 part series on XPages Mobile Controls.  Today he’ll cover outlines and Data Views.

I also talk about the current OpenNTF.org Appathon Contest.  There’s a lot of prize money available so be sure to check that out as well.

 

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Mobile Podcast XPages

NotesIn9 111: Mobile Controls Part 2

Peter Presnell comes back  today with Part 2 of his series on XPages Mobile controls.  In this show he’ll go through all the current controls provided with Ext. Library / UpdatePack / Designer 9 and define what they are and go through their key properties.

 

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Mobile Notes In 9 Podcast XPages

NotesIn9 110: Mobile Controls Part 1

NotesIn9 is back!!  Yay!

In today’s show, Peter Presnell, a past contributor comes on to start a 3 part series on Mobile controls.  In Part 1 he will give us a very basic introduction to the concepts around the mobile controls.  In Part 2 he’ll go through each design element.

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Mobile XPages

Next jQuery Mobile Hurdle

Ok, so I recently blogged about a problem getting jQuery Mobile working with XPages in Domino 9.0.  There was a lot of good idea’s and comments on that and I appreciated them all very much.  It turns out the best solution was provided by Sven Hasselbach with this post.

Now I already starting going down the Twitter Bootstrap path, which I was really liking, but I decided to take another look at jQuery Mobile.  And when I say “I decided to take another look at jQuery Mobile” what I mean is that Declan Lynch wanted to take a look at jQuery Mobile and drug me back kicking and screaming.  haha

So anyway, in no short order Declan had mobilized an internal app and I was playing with footers which can’t easily be done with XPages Mobile controls and working on a custom control for the header, content, and footer.  Just trying to get a feel for it really.

The first thing I really tried to do was get a feel for how viewScope might work.  Unlike Mobile Controls, where you work with Virtual pages, jQuery Mobile lets you work with real XPages.  I like that so much better!  Anyway, the first thing I tried to do is just put a computed field bound to viewScope and a button to update viewScope with the current time. Now the button is a normal XPages core control and I just wanted to do a partial refresh.

Clicking the button did nothing.  Tried partial refresh, tried full refresh. Nothing worked.  I didn’t even see any traffic from the browser.

I did some poking around for an answer, but not a lot.  So I thought I’d just post out here looking for some overall getting started advice.  I liked what I saw of jQuery Mobile but I want to keep Dojo working so I can use XPages controls.

Anyone have any getting started advice?

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Community Learning XPages XPages

Treasure Map to Learning XPages and a NotesIn9 Episode Guide

A couple days ago, Stephan Wissel, created a “Mind Map” on what might be involved for an XPages Project.  I thought that was pretty cool.

Around the same time I discovered this XPages community on Google+.  I highly recommend checking that out and I’ll be talking about it more on future shows.  One of the moderators of that community is Rob Bontekoe. I’ve talked to him a couple times since joining that community and he’s a really great guy.  He provides a 4 day  XPages training course that can be given remotely or on your location.  As a supplement to that course he’s created some FREE courses on Java, Managed beans and even some neat videos on other topics like the repeat control and JSF LifeCycle.  Just some really amazing content from an original IBM Champion.  I had no idea about this material.

Now I’m not going to link to everything he’s done because for one thing I don’t have that kind of time and for another he’s already done it and more I believe.  Using the Mind Map website, Rob has created this really really cool “Map” of XPages learning resources. It’s been on the Google+ Community for a while, (see what you’re missing!), but I wanted to blog about it in case you missed it.

Rob’s XPages Learning Map

Now, I personally know a good idea when I see one. And one of my biggest problems with Ni9 is a lack of a good index / table of contents.  So I took a little time to try and create a Map for NotesIn9.

NotesIn9 Episode GuideMap

So please check that out.  Let me know what you think and if you like it or not.  If it’s helpful or not.  I think it might be but I’m not sure.  I’m really worried that I won’t be able to keep up with it as new shows come out.  So I thought about not publishing it but then thought, well I already did this much.  So I don’t know if I can keep up with it.  If people think it’s helpful I’ll at least give it a try. If there are any volunteers that would like to keep this updated for me and maybe prettying it up a little bit I would welcome the help.

Thanks!

Categories
Mobile Podcast XPages

NotesIn9: 109 Selecting Multiple Documents with XPages Mobile Controls

This show starts my attempt at a little “XPages Mobile Madness”.  This is a new event for NotesIn9.  All it really means is I’m going to make a concerted effort to get a bunch of Mobile focused shows on.  I only have so many in my back pocket so I’m looking for help!

In today’s show I get another amazing contributor.  Richard Sharpe of Teamstudio comes on and shows us how to select multiple documents from a repeat control inside an XPages Mobile Controls Application.  Great stuff!

Note: I did a similar show to this way way back in NotesIn9 25.  In that show I demo’s how to select items in a repeat for a “Normal” XPages application. So if interested in this for a NON mobile solution then you might want to check that out.  http://notesin9.com/index.php/2011/04/01/notesin9-025-selecting-documents-from-a-repeat-control/

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Mobile XPages

jQuery Mobile Seems incompatible with XPages in Domino 9.0

So it’s no secret that I’m doing a lot of XPages Web Development for iPads and I have a complete love – hate relationship with XPages Mobile controls.  In some ways they’re great.  In some ways they are not so great at all.  Not all of that is XPages fault – though some is – but some of the problem is in the Dojo that drives the mobile controls.

So I really want to abandon Mobile Controls, if nothing else the whole single page App is just really really hard to debug.  If you navigate to a page you can’t EASILY view source for instance.  You need to catch it with a tool like firebug.

Anyway, so I found this project that I really wanted to use.  https://github.com/commadelimited/jQuery-Mobile-Bootstrap-Theme

In theory it’s a marriage of Twitter Bootstrap and a css “theme” that makes some elements look like you would on a mobile device.  Ideally I’d love to have the mobile look and feel since I think it’s easier for the users then a glorified web page, but I’m desperate to get to normal XPages and away from these virtual pages.  Even if the fancy transitions are lost I don’t really care any more.

So it seems it’s not just a CSS framework like I thought but it does require jQuery Mobile.  Ok – I gave it a try and guess what.  It didn’t work.  not at all.  The mobile goodies would NOT render!

Until I completely disabled Dojo!

Disabling Dojo is not an option for me.  I just can’t hand code all that stuff.  It’s not going to happen.  I’m going to be using XPages I want to USE XPages.  But why didn’t it work?  Well I had to turn to the jQuery Master himself – Mark Roden.  He took a look at it for me which I greatly appreaciated!

We’re not sure, but we think there’s a conflict between Dojo and jQuery Mobile with the “data-role” attribute.  I guess both frameworks make use of that and Dojo 1.8 grabs it first and shuts jQuery out. If I downgraded Dojo I BELIEVE it would work but that’s not an option for me.=

Apparantly I’m not the only one with this problem.

That’s what I think I know at least.  If anyone knows something else please chime in!

Personally I’m not sure what to do.  XPages Mobile controls are difficult and missing things like a bottom TabBar, though I believe the redPill company has solved that problem.  I believe Kendo UI uses virtual pages as well.  JQuery Mobile seems like you need to drop Dojo.

I think I might try the Twitter Bootstrap 3 Release Candidate.  Not really sure though.

Kinda annoying actually…