OpenNTF, I Tried, You Failed.

Posted on July 10, 2009 by qtzar

Back when I wrote Is openNTF
In Danger Of Jumping The Shark on MAY 12th it sparked a lot
of comments and other blog entries around the same topic. I was told, both
online and offline, that the changes were a good thing but the details
needed to be worked out and that my concerns and the concerns of others
would be evaluated and where possible would be addressed. In the past two
months I have put up with the technical difficulties of the forums on OpenNTF
and I have been asking questions, making suggestions and even researching
the Apache foundation for answers.

Some may argue that two months is not
a lot of time to give the OpenNTF steering committee to fix all the problems
but as an outsider to the process all I can see is more and more red tape
being introduced, take for example the latest Steering Committee minutes
which were submitted by somebody who was not even on the call ( as were
the minutes from their previous meeting ). There are NON-Steering Committee
people on the call, the technical committee should be having their own
discussions and one member of the steering committee who is on the technical
committee should be passing back the info to the steering committee, by
having them all on the call it means that can interact and influence topics
of the steering committee’s meeting that they are not a part of. The latest
minutes also sees the introduction of yet another IBM staff member. Instead
of just the one IBM person on the steering committee it is now possible
that there would be five IBMers on the call. Need I point out the entire
section in the meeting minutes called ‘IBM Agenda Items’.

If the Steering Committee really want
full transparency of the process they would publish their meeting minutes
as unedited MP3’s. It was ‘permitted’ in the meeting minutes of the May
28th meeting. IBM had to specifically allow it for some reason, It’s like
they had a veto over the steering committee or something…

Like Bruce Elgort earlier this week
I have been left disillusioned by the direction that OpenNTF is heading.
Nobody can say that I didn’t try, just look at the working group forums
and you’ll see that I was among the very very few non-steering committee
people who was actively participating and so, till OpenNTF get their act
together and realize the damage that they have done to this once excellent
community resource I am pulling ALL my projects from OpenNTF.

If you are also an OpenNTF Project
Owner that I urge you to do the exact same. We only get one vote on how
OpenNTF is run and that is by voting with our feet and walking away from
the disaster it has become.

Removing your projects is very easy.
Just log into OpenNTF and click on the projects section. You’ll see a list
of your projects on the right side of the screen

A picture named M2

Selecting each project in turn make
sure you have a download of the projects latest release and then in the
release document just click on the ‘Delete Document’ button.

A picture named M3

This will remove the download files
for the project. Next go to the ‘About’ tab for your project and click
the ‘Delete Document’ button there also.

A picture named M4

Do this for all your projects, don’t
worry about all the orphaned bug reports and other project documents, at
this stage it’s no longer your problem, I’m sure the ‘Technical Committee’
can clean them up.

When your finished your  profile
over on the right will look like this

A picture named M5

OpenNTF, I tried, You failed.

Tagged with:
Posted in None

XPages And The Death Of LotusScript

Posted on July 8, 2009 by qtzar

There have been some mussing in the ‘Yellow
Bubble’ about how XPages and the move to Server Side JavaScript is going
to be the death of LotusScript and I just have to say I completely disagree.

When people first starting seeing XPages,
many for the first time at Lotusphere, there were big oohs and awws, XPages
was destined to completely change the way many current developers write
web applications for Lotus Domino, and from my own point of view it really
has changed the way I write web applications. No more having to write massive
LotusScript libraries to output the HTML code that I want to send to the
browser via a web query open agent, Just design the XPage and custom controls,
add in small bits of SSJS at different point to show/hide/compute stuff
and bingo, a fully functional web application with a lot less work.

With XPages announced to be accessible
from the 8.5.1 Lotus Notes client there has been some concerns that there
will no longer be a need for developers to learn LotusScript, why would
you need to bother to learn LotusScript when you can create a write once
deploy anywhere application but that is where the entire argument falls
down for me. There are times where you need one interface on the web and
a different interface on the client. While it might be possible for you
to write your application so you can do everything from a web based interface
that does not always mean it’s the best thing for you to do. There are
lots of things in the Lotus Notes client that are much easier to do in
or are just not offered through a web interface so there will always be
a need for developers to think about creating a full client experience
as well as the XPage experience.

Lets not forget that not all applications
will be web based. There is no way I’m ever going to put a web interface
on some of our internal applications, especially our HR system that contains
secure information protected by document encryption keys. If I ever need
to write a web interface for our HR system I’d rather sync a subset of
the data that needs to be on the web into a separate database and put the
interface on that database, thus protecting the original source. In fact
I already do this for our internal phonebook application ( which I must
upgrade to XPages at some stage ).

There is also the question about agents,
even in new applications your going to need to write scheduled agents,
currently you can write them in LotusScript or Java and I personally don’t
see IBM getting any benefit from adding SSJS to the mix here as there are
aspects of SSJS that would not fit, for example scope variables, context
and facescontext. An agent version of SSJS would need to be different from
the XPages version of SSJS so this would just be introducing yet another
language for IBM to maintain into the mix.

So if your sitting on the sidelines
wondering if you need to need to learn LotusScript or SSJS then my advice
is that you learn both, you can use the skills you get from learning LotusScript
to speed up your leaning of SSJS and vice versa. LotusScript is not a dead
language and I certainly don’t see it disappearing from your applications
even if you make the move to Xpages.

Tagged with: , ,
Posted in None

XPages Tip : Loaded Vs Rendered

Posted on June 15, 2009 by qtzar

In XPages when you look at the properties
of any control there are options for ‘Loaded’ and ‘Rendered’

A picture named M2

The difference is very subtle, while
either of the properties will result in the control not displaying on the
XPage if they evaluate to false there are times where the ‘Loaded’ property
will result in a faster page for the end user. Here’s an example…

In my Advanced
XPages : A Nicer Domino Login Part 1 mini-series I have a custom
control that included a number of Dojo libraries, some extra JavaScript
and a Dojo dialog box. This code is only needed if the user of the site
is not logged in so why bother load it once the user is logged in?

As I have everything inside a custom
control I can set the ‘loaded’ or ‘rendered’ property on the page where
I have added the custom control. If I use the ‘rendered’ property then
the XPages processor still processes the custom control and even if the
rendered property evaluates to false the XPages processor will detect that
there are dojo libraries and extra resources to be loaded and will therefore
insert them into the html header of the generated page.

If you use the ‘Loaded’ property and
it evaluates to false the XPages processor will completely skip processing
the control and therefore the extra dojo libraries and resources are not
inserted into the html header and the resulting web page does not have
any extra deadweight so the page will load slightly faster.

So if you have a reason to load extra
resources in an XPage but only for special circumstances then consider
putting them into a custom control and use the ‘loaded’ property so that
they are only loaded when needed. Using this on my xTalk application I
reduced the page load from a 155KB, 4.7 Second load time to a 92KB, 1.2
Second load time  ( with cache disabled ).

Tagged with: , ,
Posted in None

Announcing xTalk the XPages Bulletin Board style Discussion Database

Posted on June 11, 2009 by qtzar

The discussion database in IBM Lotus Domino
has been around for a very long time getting minor updates as different
versions of Domino came out over the years, mostly just color updates.
When Domino 8.5 was released the discussion database design was given a
major overhaul with a nice new XPages interface and for the future there
may be even more changes with the news from OpenNTF that IBM may be looking
at open sourcing the template.

IBM is considering
open sourcing the discussion template, which would allow the community
to extend it. IBM could then take the extensions back into the product.

Personally I’ve never been a big fan
of the discussion template, mainy due to the way it does threaded replies.
When doing threaded replies ( and replies to replies ) there are two ways
to display them, either just display one reply at a time and show the subject
lines of the threads below, very similar to how the forums on notes.net
currently work, or you can try display all the entries on screen at the
same time and indent the replies, only problem with this is with an active
forum with lots of replies to replies you end up with entries displaying
in about one inch on the side of the screen.

My prefered discussion forum format
is the Bulletin Board style where all the replies to a topic appear directly
below the main topic entry. This format is mainly used in forum software
like phpBB or VBulletin and even the most excellent DomBulletin that you
can currently get on OpenNTF in the projects section.

So I decided to write a phpBB Bulletin
Board style XPages application TWO days ago. I start with a blank database,
pulled in my base oneUI custom control layout design documents, created
FOUR forms with about SIX fields on each one, created FOUR views and FOUR
XPages containing the custom controls for the layout and one of FOUR custom
controls on each XPage to display the contents for that XPage and I came
up with xTalk.

You can try it out here : http://blog.dnaware.net/openntf/xtalk/xtalk.nsf

I’ve granted anonymous access the ability
to create new topics and reply to existing topics however in a production
environment a login would be required to capture the name of the person
posting to the forum.

There’s still a few things to do, add
sticky entries, grant the owner the ability to lock threads or forums and
a little more CSS work to tidy things up. Hopefully once it’s all finished
I’ll be able to release it on OpenNTF and who knows, maybe there will be
two discussion databases in the next Domino release, one for threaded style
and one for bulletin board style.

Tagged with: , ,
Posted in None
Archives