Lotus Awards For OpenNTF and GPL Submissions

Posted on October 27, 2009 by qtzar

As you may have heard over on Ed Brill’s blog
and on the OpenNTF blog
and even talked about in the Taking
Notes 100th Episode PodCast, IBM Lotus have added two new awards
to the Lotus Awards
( formally Beacon Awards ) for this year. These are for the best
open source solution by an individual and best
open source solution by a business partner.

The award is open to all OpenNTF projects
members with a few minor exceptions where steering committee members are
excluded from individual awards and IBM staff are excluded from both awards.
The idea behind these exclusions are so that YOU have a chance to win,
there have been a lot of great OpenNTF contributions by IBM staff over
the past few months and it would not be great if IBM ended up awarding
themselves, if you know what I mean.

So what’s all this got to do with GPL,
simple really. GPL projects on OpenNTF have the exact same chance of winning
one of the two awards just as much as APL projects and I would like to
encourage all GPL project owners to look at their projects and see if they
can get them entered.

To enter a project in for the award,
be it an APL or a GPL project, there are a couple of things you need to
do first, you need to make sure that you have signed and sent in the ICLA
or CCLA to the IP Manager and then you need to request that your project
be reviewed for submission in the APl or GPL catalog.

If you are thinking of submitting your
GPL project for the award and your getting it all ready for submission
to the GPL catalog then I’d like to pass on a few hints to make the process
as smooth as possible. As the GPL Commitor I will ultimately be reviewing
the submission for the GPL catalog and here are just a few things that
I’ll be looking out for.

1. Make sure you have included the correct
license file at the root level of the zip file that your NSF/NTF is stored
in.

2. If you have used any third party
code then make sure you include a NOTICES.TXT file in the root of the zip
listing the code area and licenses for those bits of code.

3. If you have a lot of third party
code then maybe a separate directory to hold all the third party licenses
would be a good idea.

4. Documentation on how to install,
configure and use the application is a must. It doesn’t have to be fancy
but it must exist.

One important thing to be aware of is
the compatibility of licenses, GPL2 and GPL3 are very different. If you
have third party GPL2 code in your project then you can’t release your
project under GPL3, you’ll have to release it under GPL2 as technically
your not authorised to release the third party code under a different license.
License compatibility is something that we’ll be looking at carefully.

I’m really looking forward to getting
the first few GPL projects into the GPL catalog on OpenNTF and the Lotus
Awards are a great way to encourage this. I’ll be looking forward to the
IP Manager sending me a list of projects that you have requests to be reviewed.

BTW, just so everybody knows, the Lotus
Awards are judged by a panel of IBM staff and a panel of people from the
industry press. The OpenNTF steering committee and member companies are
not involved in the judging process in any way.

Good luck to everybody who enters.

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Unhiding the hidden ‘hidden input’ control in XPages

Posted on October 20, 2009 by qtzar

There is a new control type in 8.5.1 that
for some reason is hidden and this is the ‘Hidden Input’ control. When
doing web development it is quite common to include hidden fields on a
webpage that are then submitted to the server. In XPages on 8.5.0 there
was no easy way to do this, you could create a field and then hide it using
CSS but that is not a great solution as when CSS is disabled the field
becomes visible.

In XPages in IBM Lotus Domino 8.5.1
you can now directly add hidden input fields to your webpage but the control
is not listed with the rest of the core controls, you have to use the ‘Other’
option to select the ‘Hidden Input’ control or you can turn it on permanently
in the Domino Designer preferences. I’ve highlighted below where to find
it.

A picture named M2

You can bind a hidden input to a field
in a Notes document in XPages just like you would a normal input and you
can write client side javascript and server side javascript to access and
change the contents of the field. I’m using this in the name picker in
xTalk. When the page where the name picker is shown some client side javascript
takes the values in the listbox, puts a semi-colon between the values and
adds them as a single string to the hidden field which is bound to a field
in the Notes document. The server side javascript then converts the field
into a READERS or AUTHORS field as required by the code.

In the screenshot above you might also
notice a few other controls that are not enabled by default, they are mostly
select explanatory like Line Break, Span, Paragraph and Block Content (
DIV ). I’m still investigating what Output Script does. I’ll blog again
once I know.

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xTalk Is on OpenNTF

Posted on October 16, 2009 by qtzar

When IBM Lotus Notes/Domino 8.5.1 was released
on Monday I also released a new open source project on OpenNTF called xTalk.
I’ve talked about it here a few times already but now I want to describe
a few of the features that have been added in the latest build that you
can download from OpenNTF.

The latest build on OpenNTF, xTalk V0.7,
is in my own opinion, a feature complete build for the first version of
the application. There are a couple of minor bugs that I’m working out
but that should not stop anybody from using the application in a test environment.
So what’s been added since I last spoke about the project.

Easy Startup.

As the application is 100% XPages on
both the web browser and in the Lotus Notes 8.5.1 client I had to make
the application easy to configure. When you first load the application
in your browser you’ll see the following screen

A picture named M2

If you then log in it will check the
ACL to see if you have the ForumOwner role and if you do the home page
will change to assist you in creating your first ‘Forum Category’

A picture named M3

Once you have created the forum category
the screen will then assist you with creating new forums within the forum
category.

A picture named M4

So within a few minutes of download
and deploying the application you can be up and running with your forums

A picture named M5

BBCode Editor.

In my initial test builds of xTalk I
had used the XPages Richtext Editor component but I also wanted to support
the BBCode system that is used in all of the web forums that I based the
design of xTalk on. Not wanting to mix both Richtext and BBCode I decided
to move to BBCode only which meant changing the richtext control into a
simple text area.

Above the text area I then added buttons
to give the user who may be unfamiliar with BBCode the ability to style
their messages.

A picture named M6

There are options to Bold the text,
add links, images, email addresses, change the color and size of the font
and even include quote blocks and code blocks.

Edit Your Message.

One feature that somebody asked for
early on in the development cycle was to provide the ability for a user
to edit their own messages. In xTalk I decided to implement a timed approch
to this request and only give the user a limited window in which they can
edit their own posts.

The the lower right corner of each post
the ‘Edit’ button will appear if the viewer is the original author of the
post and it is within 10 minutes of the posts creations date/time.

A picture named M7

Quoting A Message.

In the screen snippit above you’ll also
see a ‘quote’ icon. Clicking this icon will take the text of the message
and append it to anyting in the reply area and surround it with the special
BBCode that is required to mark it as a quote.

A picture named M8

Buttons Everywhere.

If you have the ForumOwner role in the
ACL or if you have been designated as a category owner or individual forum
owner then you will see lots of moderator and configuration buttons that
normal users won’t be able to see. Bringing the buttons into the UI means
that here is no need for a separate administration interface. Here’s what
some of the buttons look like.

A picture named M9 
A picture named M10

I’ve tried to select icons that will
be self explanatory. the green + icon will add stuff, like forum categories
or forum areas depending on which level you click the button in. The pencil
icon will edit a forum category or forum area, the lock icon will lock
a forum area or topic, the pushpin will mark topics as sticky.

The red – icon is only visible if you
have the ForumOwner role in the ACL and it will delete items. If you delete
a topic then all the replies are deleted also, if you delete a forum then
all the topic and replies in that forum are deleted and if you delete a
category all the forums and topics and replies within all the forums in
that category are deleted. You will have a chance to back out of doing
the deletion and the warning screen will tell you how many threads and
posts would be deleted.

A picture named M11

——

So there you have it, all the featured
discussed above are available in the xTalk 0.7 build that is currently
on OpenNTF. If you have no yet checked out xTalk then please feel free
to download it and if your going to use it in a live environment for any
reason then I’d love to hear about it.

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Lotus Traveler Bounce Database

Posted on October 12, 2009 by qtzar

There are two ways of installing your Lotus
Traveler infrastructure. You can install a single Lotus Traveler server
that your users can connect to and it will read the users mailfile from
whatever Domino server the mailfile happens to sit on or you can install
Lotus Traveler on every Domino server and allow the users to hit their
own Traveler server.

In the first instance setup is very
easy, you can change the homepage of your single traveler server to point
to the /servlet/traveler and just give the URL of that single server to
your users. If you don’t want to change the homepage of the server you
could setup a virtual hostname on that server pointing to the /servlet/traveler
directory.

Now, if you decide to install Traveler
on each Domino server you no longer have a single URL that you can give
your users and this is a problem I was thinking about for our own environment
until I thought about the INotes Redirect database. It has the ability
to easily work out the users home server, so why not make use of that database.
I created a new virtual hostname pointing a new new copy of the iNotes
Redirection database, I disabled it from picking up design changes from
the template and then opened it in my designer client.

Now, as this template was not
one of the templates that has been open sourced by IBM on OpenNTF I can’t
distribute my version of the database, I can however generally describe
what I changed so that you can make the same changes to your legally licensed
copy of the template on your Lotus Domino 8.5.1 servers.

In the designer client open the ‘AutoLogin’
form and scroll all the way to the bottom to find a field called $$HTMLHead,
select this field and have a look at the code. Towards the bottom you’ll
see where the HTTP-EQUIV refresh is done to redirect to another URL and
you’ll see how the URL is constructed using the users servername and path
your their mailfile. Making use of the server name variable you can easily
edit this to redirect the the /servlet/traveler/ directory on the users
home server instead of redirecting to the users mailfile.

Save the form and you now have a Lotus
Traveler redirection database that will be easier to direct your users
to.

Maybe IBM can add the iNotes Redirect
database to the list of open source databases, if they do then I’ll be
free to put my version up on OpenNTF also.

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