Here’s a quick little show that I threw together last night. Was talking to someone who had a question on how to do a Collapse All/Expand All for a view control and it turns out to be WAY more difficult then it should. I’ll maintain there are better UI constructs to do this but he wanted to stick with a view control. So here goes.
Some links from the show:
I received a sad phone call yesterday. My former company is considering abandoning the Notes/domino platform for Application development due to the inability to find a Notes/Domino Developer. They would keep Notes for Email as they’re very happy with Notes overall. But not having a resource available to continue to enhance the applications is becoming a big problem.
They have iSeries (AS/400) developers on staff and I guess are considering moving app dev to PHP on the iSeries. I guess that’s a supported language in some fashion.
One of the problems of finding a person is that the company is a little “old school” in some ways. They have no interest in “Work form Home”. They want someone, full time, in Lebanon Pa. Lebanon is not exactly a hot bed of technology. They also need someone “affordable”.
I’m on good terms with them and they’ve asked me to come in next week to have a brief discussion with the President of the company on the pros and cons of this thinking. Of reasons to stay with Notes as opposed to moving to a different platform. Almost all the apps are currently Notes Client apps, and before I left, the decision was made to move them to XPages to embrace the web.
Of course I don’t want to see them move off Notes, though not being able to find an affordable resource is a pretty big hurdle to the discussion. I could go on and on about some of the advantages or the platform, Security…. agents… XPages… Maybe get into RAD though it’s clear other platforms can be RAD as well to at least some point. I know very little about PHP, especially PHP on iSeries.
The interesting thing is that they really don’t have any true Web developers in house. They have excellent RPG developers who can do SOME things on the Web like Web services and Net.Data pages. So there’s going to have to be some training that has to take place. Do they bring someone up to speed on Domino/XPages? Or do they just forget it and go the PHP route? It boggles my mind that they can find RPG developers pretty easily but not Notes Devs.
If anyone has any opinions or thoughts I’d sure appreciate hearing them.
I’ve been running dark for a little bit so I just thought I’d give a couple of updates regarding NotesIn9.
First – April was the best month ever for total Views and Downloads! Absolutely amazing. I don’t take the download/view stats too seriously as that’s just not the point of NotesIn9. But I do keep an eye on them as that at least gives me a hint of the interest level. The overall numbers completely blew my previous record month out of the water. So it does seem like interest in XPages is growing.
As an Example, April had another 400+ downloads/views of my Introduction to XPages show. Bringing the total views on notesin9.com for that show to 3,776 since it was released. Adding in youTube numbers puts that around 4,000 views for the 1st part of my XPages Jumpstart. Now I’m sure some people are watching it more then once.. or downloaded it and not watched it. But overall, with the information that I have, it appears that there’s improving interest in XPages.
Ok. Enough about that stuff.
Second: It’s no real secret that the most difficult thing about NotesIn9 for me is not creating the shows, it’s the backend workflow and publishing of the shows. It’s a huge struggle and I’m looking into ways to improve it. For my next attempt at improving this, I’m starting to migrate the shows from libsyn to blubrry.com in an effort to get better embedded players available and an improved publishing workflow. So if there are any problems for older or future shows please let me know.
Third: Regarding new shows…. Here’s my plan…
I’m going to start a small series of videos which will be a more or less “complete” app build from beginning to end. I’ve been wanting to do this for quite some time actually. This was the one of the main reasons I started the Extended Editions a while back.
I’m going to try and do these a little differently. Since they will be more involved then my usual short and hopefully focused videos, I’m going to try and change the style a little bit. Honestly I’m going to probably put less planning into the videos and just sit down and “wing it”. It’ll be like live development in theory. look out!
I’m hoping this kind of goes with the theme of RAD development from the other week. Actually the first video is very much like the 3ish minute Great XPages Race show that I did for fun. But it runs about 15 minutes because I take the time to explain they why’s and hows.
I’m hoping that this kind of goes with the theme of the RAD video I did in Great XPages Race the other week.
Will this be the greatest most polished app in the world? Probably not. But hopefully it’ll help people get comfortable with XPages.
Also on the docket is some other stand alone shows that I’m REALLY excited about.
Now I didn’t mention timing. I hope it will be VERY SOON. But with a new puppy coming tomorrow… we’ll no promises. 🙂
Anyway – That’s my story. Thanks so much for all the interest!!
I just wanted to take a minute to say how absolutely impressed I am with IBM about a couple of things.
First, and this was covered in detail on The XCast podcast, but they really did a great job of responding to the community regarding the XPages forum. We asked… ok for some of us, myself included, I think “demanded” would be the more appropriate word. And they delivered. They’re not finished with that but they moved very quickly on working with the community in an unprecedented manner.
The next thing they did is a little more personal.
You see I’m a member of one of the Notes Design Partner program. As such I’ve signed an NDA which means I can run early Beta’s but must not divulge anything inappropriate. That means that I can’t run the beta code in my home environment because of the NotesIn9 screencast. But what do you do when you get to a point where the Beta has such an important feature that you don’t want to go back to 8.5.2? It has something that you’ve always wanted, started using, and now can’t live without? Well here’s what I did:
1.) I emailed a contact at IBM asking if it was ok for me to use the beta code in NotesIn9 as long as it’s a disclaimer. There was a similar arrangement pre 8.5.1.
2.) I hear back – Same day mind you, that sure- it’s not a problem. Yay!
3.) But hold the phone! I then hear that there was a misunderstanding and that technically it’s not ready until the NEXT code drop. 🙁 But wait. What they will do for me is create a waiver so I don’t have to wait and can continue with the CURRENT software.
How awesome is that?!?! Seriously. IBM is this HUGE company and sure, they’re not perfect – I still have never gotten my Lotusphere evaluations… but in at least these 2 cases they’ve gone out of their way to be accommodating to community requests. I could also mention the fact that they’ve been supplying the LUGS with printed XPagesCheatSheets as another big win.
Do other companies respond to their communites like this? I have no idea but I’m very glad IBM is really taking to heart the whole “Be Social. Do Business” thing. Thanks IBM!
What’s this killer feature I’m so interested in? You’ll have to wait for the next NotesIn9 for that!
🙂
I got this in my email, but as much as I like, I can’t really advice this person as I myself don’t know that much about integrating XPages and a relational database, which I assume Postgres is.
So I thought I’d through this out to see of anyone had any thoughts on this.
===============
Dear David,
I am very new to Lotus notes 8.5.2 and I am trying to learn programming in lotus notes Xpages.
I have to develop a meeting room reservation system using calendar and mail user list of Lotus Notes as the GUI and then save the data in the postgres database.
Can you tell me that is possible to mix read/write the Lotus notes mail and calendar DB with Postgres DB in XPages.
The reason for doing this is, that we have the reservation system online already but we would like to encourage our users to use Lotus notes more and migrate the application within Lotus Notes some how.
I am very grate full for your time in advanced.
When you use a view control there is a simple action for working with selected documents. In SSJS there is a method, getSelectedIDs (or something like that), that let’s you get a handle on any selected documents. However neither of these solutions exist for documents inside a Repeat Control.
In this show l will demonstrate how have a repeat control and get a handle on any documents that the user selects.
I’m TRYING to improve the site… It’s slow going.
P.S. This is the 25th episode of my normal NotesIn9 show. 🙂 All the XPages shows, the XPages Jumpstart and the Extended Editions can be found easily at xpages.tv
P.S. Ok. I’ll admit it. I did have a thought on doing some April Fools Joke here. Maybe a Rick Roll – but then I thought that the “Rick Roll” has run it’s course. Maybe that “Friday” song should be the new Rick Roll? But don’t worry. This video is safe! 🙂
P.P.S If you have a Mac… and Kids… a great April Fools prank is to ssh into the mac from an iPad or other device and use the “Say” command. Great fun. I had my kids thinking their Mac was Watson’s cousin. 🙂
This is a special show that I started last night to basically respond to a couple of blog posts from Jake Howlett at codestore.net.
I believe that XPages is RAD. I pretty much did the building in 3:45 give or take a second or two. It might be interesting to spend another 5 minutes to add things like security, validation and mobile controls to make it truly production ready.
Again – this is just an all in fun kinda thing. There are pros and cons to any platform.
I am blessed in life by being married to my lovely wife Becky. She’s my best friend and I’m very proud of her.
She’s extremely creative and rather tenacious when she get’s an idea.
I’m hopeful that one day I’ll figure out how to use her powers for the good or all mankind.
🙂
Love ya sweetie!!
In this extended edition, Chris Connor comes back on the show to talk about extending and XPages app to the mobile platform by using the mobile controls from OpenNTF.
A little while ago I was looking at my MacBook Pro, which is a 15 inch 1680×1050 Anti-Glare with a 500GB 7200 Hard drive and got the itch to tweak it out a little bit. I really wanted to try an SSD drive which I’ve heard so much about…..
Ok that’s a TOTAL lie… What really happened is that my wife needed a new desktop, and when I spec’d it out I made sure she had an SSD drive for the OS. I thought I could handle her having one and not me. TOTAL FAIL!
So I sprung for a SSD drive for my laptop. Actually I splurged and got one of the bigger “affordable” ones which is a 240GB Mercury drive from macsales.com. I told myself it had to be that big because I really wanted 2 of my notes VM’s to be on the SSD drive, but I KNEW that I couldn’t live with only a 240 GB hard drive. So rather then carrying an external USB drive with me – I had to sacrifice the optical drive and go for two hard drives – moving my original to the space where the optical was. Conveniently, macsales.com sells a special bracket to do just that.
Let me tell you. The hardware moves were EASY. Macsales had high quality videos show everything you needed to see.
What was difficult to me, was actually the OS. It seems on the Mac, if you want to install to a SSD in the boot drive, you better have a 10.6.4 OS disc. Earlier versions would not install in the boot drive. I ended up putting the SSD into my mac Pro and installed and updated it there. Was quite a pain actually. But it did work.
Am I happy with all this and the SSD?
Unbelievably so! I like that I can start a full Windows 7 VM in like 12 seconds. The mac apps are all but instant. It’s just a beautiful thing. And I ended up with more disc space then I started with. Do I miss the optical? Not really. I rarely use it. And even if i did get an install disc it’s easy to convert it to a DMG file.
So I truly think I’ve extended the life of my laptop until at LEAST Apple’s next refresh of the MacBook Pro line.
🙂