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Latest 7 Posts
XPages MVC: Experiment II, Part 1
Wed, May 23rd 2012 47
Optimizing for the Wrong Thing
Wed, May 23rd 2012 73
XPages MVC: Experiment I
Tue, May 22nd 2012 115
More Musing About Controllers
Sun, May 13th 2012 95
The Language of the Platform
Thu, May 10th 2012 110
Separation of Concerns
Wed, May 9th 2012 126
Swapping Between JRuby Embed Methods
Tue, May 8th 2012 76
Top 10
Formatting View Content on the Web
Wed, Feb 1st 2012 329
How I Want To Use Domino
Wed, Mar 7th 2012 306
Arbitrary Scripting Languages in XPages
Thu, Apr 19th 2012 306
More Idle Complaining About Designer
Sun, Jan 22nd 2012 293
LotusLearns did a poor job copying my post
Fri, Apr 20th 2012 288
Enhancing xe:dynamicViewPanel For My Own Purposes
Thu, Feb 9th 2012 284
This Dynamic View Customizer Is Getting Into Shape
Mon, Feb 13th 2012 283
Keychain DB: Very Rough First Script
Sun, Jan 15th 2012 270
Getting My Feet Wet With Ruby and the Domino C API
Thu, Jan 26th 2012 269
Import from SQL to NSF: It's So Easy!
Sat, Apr 7th 2012 254


Jesse Gallagher
Blog Title frostillic.us
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Feed Last Checked May 23, 2012 8:12:35 PM EST. Realtime Update:
Landed Here Nov 22, 2011
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Recent Blog Posts
47


XPages MVC: Experiment II, Part 1
Wed, May 23rd 2012 1:07p   Jesse Gallagher
As I've mentioned a couple times, my largest XPages app to date is the site I did for my guild's forums. The forum part itself isn't particularly amazing, considering it's almost harder to NOT write a forum in Domino than it is to write one, but it gave me a chance to try my hand at abstracting data access away from the XPage. I put "Part 1" in the title because I figure it will be best to break the topic up into at least three parts: the overall idea and the result, the structure of the [read] Keywords: domino rich text script library xpages interface javascript server
73


Optimizing for the Wrong Thing
Wed, May 23rd 2012 6:13a   Jesse Gallagher
My apartment has a core logistical issue: it has two floors and the connection is a spiral staircase. This is generally fine for normal use, but it's a giant hassle when moving in or out: the building has to hire some guys to essentially dismantle the stairs to turn each step to one side so they can hoist large objects like bookshelves and beds up and down. In order to make this mildly more practical, the building decided to replace one of the upstairs windows in each apartment with a model th [read] Keywords:
115


XPages MVC: Experiment I
Tue, May 22nd 2012 3:12p   Jesse Gallagher
Now that I've had a bit of time, I've started trying out some ideas for new ways to do XPage development. Specifically, I'm trying out the "XPages as the Controller" setup I pondered last time. The general goal is this: There would be one XPage for each zone of concern (I don't know the right terminology): Posts.xsp, Users.xsp, etc. The XPage itself would have almost nothing on it - it would exist as a trigger for the server to load an appropriate Controller class, which would in turn [read] Keywords: domino xpages development server sql
95


More Musing About Controllers
Sun, May 13th 2012 6:12a   Jesse Gallagher
I've been thinking more about this MVC thing, thanks to re-learning Rails. I'm fairly convinced that moving as much code as possible out of the XPage and into wrapper objects is a big improvement (convinced enough that it feels silly that wasn't doing it already), but it still feels not quite right. Two parts of the MVC trinity are straightforward in modern Domino development: Forms and wrapper objects are the Model and XPages are the View. The Controller is where things get muddy. Off the t [read] Keywords: domino xpages application development server
110


The Language of the Platform
Thu, May 10th 2012 5:12p   Jesse Gallagher
The most recent episodes of Hypercritical and Build and Analyze discuss a new third-party iOS development environment called RubyMotion. Essentially, RubyMotion is an iOS version of MacRuby: an implementation of Ruby on top of the native Objective-C runtime, allowing programmers to write native apps in Ruby. This is similar in nature to JRuby and the like, in that the Ruby objects you deal with are real objects in the underlying platform, and you manipulate them in the same way, at near-native s [read] Keywords: domino lotusscript notes development java javascript mac server
126


Separation of Concerns
Wed, May 9th 2012 5:12p   Jesse Gallagher
A while back, I wondered about the right way to write XPages. Things have changed a bit since then - Domino has gotten a bit better, the Extension Library exists and is great, and I'm a bit more adept with the environment. The forum app, which I should probably write a post explaining one day, came together kind of like how I mentioned there - Java classes to wrap all of the Domino access, which dramatically reduced the amount of code in the XPages themselves. Still, I'm not sure I'm doing i [read] Keywords: domino xpages java properties widgets xml
76


Swapping Between JRuby Embed Methods
Tue, May 8th 2012 7:12a   Jesse Gallagher
When going about making Ruby in XPages work, I had to figure out which of the three JRuby embed methods to use: Core, JSR 223, and BSF. For my purposes, it seems like the need for BSF was obviated by JSR 223 (there are some differences, but I'm not sure they matter to me), so it's really a choice between the first two. I've tried both, and I keep swapping between them (the next beta, if things stay stable, will likely switch back to Core) and between various configurations inside them, due to [read] Keywords: xpages javascript openntf server wiki




182


A Quick-and-Dirty "$$ViewTemplateDefault" (-ish) for XPages
Thu, May 3rd 2012 6:11p   Jesse Gallagher
8.5.3 brought with it the very-handy "Display XPage Instead" property for views. It's great! That way, you can keep more of your existing URLs in old apps or just generally use cleaner ones in new apps - XPages are awesome, but ".xsp" in the URL is not. In a full-blown app, you're probably going to point each view to its own XPage containing the hand-crafted fancified version. Sometimes, though, you just want to toss a xe:dynamicViewPanel on a page and that's good enough. However, unlike [read] Keywords: domino xpages database java javascript server
244


The Greatest Domino Poster of All Time
Fri, Apr 20th 2012 5:13p   Jesse Gallagher
My company is moving out of the offices it has inhabited for... longer than I've been alive, basically. During this move, we've had plenty of opportunities to come across relics of its past form as an instructor-led training location: old courseware, ancient versions of Windows, NetWare, and Notes/Domino (from before it was Domino), and some priceless marketing materials. Some of the posters we've found are worth a good chuckle or two (a NotesMail poster boasting "Finally, a mail system you [read] Keywords: domino ibm lotus notes notesmail exchange exchange server wiki
288


LotusLearns did a poor job copying my post
Fri, Apr 20th 2012 5:13p   Jesse Gallagher
So apparently, this site LotusLearns has been re-posting quite a few Lotus blogs without permission, and my recent Ruby action plan post made the cut. It's bad enough to see my post aggregated without permission and plastered with ads that don't make me any money, but it's even worse that the replica of the post is thoroughly corrupt. For one, it leaves of the "S" in the opening "So". Additionally, the XSP markup I posted is passed through to the browser unencoded, leaving a bunch of bla [read] Keywords: lotus ntf xpages
306


Arbitrary Scripting Languages in XPages
Thu, Apr 19th 2012 7:12p   Jesse Gallagher
I think I've settled on JSR 223, the generic "Scripting in Java" specification, as the likely best way to embed Ruby. It seems like the "correct" way to do it and generally the cleanest. I don't like the notion that the way to customize the runtime is by setting system properties, so I'm still a little wary, but it'll do for now, in any event. The side benefit of JSR 223 (and this would be true of BSF as well) is that it supports a crapload of languages, and it does so in a very unified [read] Keywords: xpages java openntf properties server wiki
206


An Action Plan for Ruby-in-XPages
Fri, Apr 13th 2012 8:12a   Jesse Gallagher
[read] Keywords: xpages
120


Wherein I Go A Tad Insane
Wed, Apr 11th 2012 6:12p   Jesse Gallagher
A bit of conversation earlier about Rails set my brain onto a disastrous course. Since I've been doing so much with Ruby lately, it's only natural to have the question of whether anything can be done related to Rails hovering nearby at all times - Rails brought Ruby to prominence and is itself an amazing piece of software with a lot to teach. It's not, however, a natural fit for Domino - Rails, to my knowledge, wears its SQL proudly, and any attempt to use Domino as a backing data source woul [read] Keywords: acl domino ibm ntf xpages database eclipse java server sql websphere xml
205


Making A Project Out Of The Blog and Ruby
Tue, Apr 10th 2012 5:12p   Jesse Gallagher
Now that I have the blog in Domino and acting as an accelerating incubator for Ruby-in-XPages (man, I need a better name for that), I decided I may as well put 8.5.3's filesystem synching to good use and put the whole thing up on GitHub with everything else: https://github.com/jesse-gallagher/frostillic.us-Blog I've also started keeping a todo list in the README file there with my notes and future plans for the blog, the Ruby runtime, and a tentative "Misc" section. As for the interpreter [read] Keywords: domino notes xpages application server
226


File Under "Man, I Hope Designer Still Works After This"
Sun, Apr 8th 2012 4:12p   Jesse Gallagher
Well, I think the new blog has gone relatively smoothly, other than my accidental re-posting of my SQL-migration post (which oddly seems more popular than its first run, just one day earlier). That means it's time to get started on the next phases. Other than the mundane setting-up-a-blog stuff like implementing search and proper draft posts, I have a lot of work to do surrounding my Ruby bindings. Since I'm going to eventually want Ruby "script libraries" and other handy non-inline uses, I [read] Keywords: domino eclipse sql vm
254


Import from SQL to NSF: It's So Easy!
Sat, Apr 7th 2012 9:12p   Jesse Gallagher
I decided I should probably finally get around to moving this blog from WordPress to Domino, if for no other reason than to have a perfect testbed for the weird stuff I've been doing lately. The first task is to write an importer, so I decided to just do a straight SQL rows -> Domino documents import. This couldn't be easier if you follow this simple guide: Write a Java agent that uses the appropriate JDBC connector for your database. In my case, it's MySQL, so I had it do a "show tabl [read] Keywords: agent domino database java mysql sql
149


Making the Dogfooding Switch
Sat, Apr 7th 2012 9:12p   Jesse Gallagher
I've finally done it: I've switched my blog over to Domino. I did it for a couple reasons: To silence the voice in the back of my head constantly saying "why are you using WordPress? You're a freaking web programmer! Write your own!" To put my Ruby-in-XPages code through its paces in the way only a live site can. I've already had to fix a couple holes in my Ruby adapter, mostly revolving around the fact that I haven't bothered to properly handle serialization and JSF's StateHolder in [read] Keywords: domino notes notes client xpages blogging javascript
206


Import From SQL to NSF: It’s So Easy!
Fri, Apr 6th 2012 6:13a   Jesse Gallagher
I decided I should probably finally get around to moving this blog from WordPress to Domino, if for no other reason than to have a perfect testbed for the weird stuff I've been doing lately. The first task is to write an importer, so I decided to just do a straight SQL rows -> Domino documents import. This couldn't be easier if you follow this simple guide: Write a Java agent that uses the appropriate JDBC connector for your database. In my case, it's MySQL, so I had it do a "show tabl [read] Keywords: agent domino database java mysql sql
177


Ruby-in-XPages is Inching Towards Practicality
Wed, Apr 4th 2012 7:12p   Jesse Gallagher
I've made some more encouraging progress today in my quest to be able to actually use Ruby when doing XPages development. I implemented method binding (as opposed to just value binding) and found a way to shim in the interpreter so that Ruby can be used for early events like beforePageLoad. The revised code is up on my GitHub profile: https://github.com/jesse-gallagher/Domino-One-Offs That last part was kind of tough - I found structures for custom Application objects in the XSP Starter Kit, [read] Keywords: domino xpages application development java javascript openntf profile properties server xml
111


#{ruby: ‘it’s a start’}
Tue, Apr 3rd 2012 5:13p   Jesse Gallagher
Oh man, I think this might actually work. Feeling adventurous this evening, I decided to look into the XPage runtime's expression language handler. After poring through tons of methods, interfaces, implementation classes, EXTENDED implementation classes, and disparate JARs, I narrowed the prefix handler down to the "FactoryLookup" property of the IBM-specific variant of facesContext's Application. With that, which is basically a hash, you map a prefix to a handler factory (it's always facto [read] Keywords: domino ibm application java
112


Putting the Domain Catalog to a Bit of Use
Tue, Apr 3rd 2012 11:13a   Jesse Gallagher
Since I kind of backed my way into Domino development and administration, there are a number of areas of the server's functionality that I'm either unfamiliar with or casually brushed off as unreliable or not overly useful. The Domain Catalog is one such area: I've been vaguely familiar with it, but have never bothered to tend to it or use it to solve problems. Fortunately, a problem it's perfectly suited to fell into my lap. In an overarching administration database, I want to get from a d [read] Keywords: admin administration dblookup domino database development properties server
72


What Makes the Hassle Worthwhile
Mon, Apr 2nd 2012 8:13p   Jesse Gallagher
I've been toying with my Ruby servlet a bit this evening and it didn't take long to start having some fun. For example, here's a snippet from a page I'm building with Markaby, which is an aging little library that makes building HTML pages declaratively a cinch: $database.views.sort { |a, b| a.name b.name }.each do |view| li { a view.name } unless view.name =~ /^\(.*\)$/ end That prints out the names of all the non-hidden views in the database, sorted alphabetically, inside an HT [read] Keywords: agent database java javascript server
151


My Recurring Ruby/Domino Dream
Sun, Apr 1st 2012 4:11p   Jesse Gallagher
As is no doubt clear by now, one of my obsessions when it comes to Domino is trying to make my programming life better, and one of the best ways I can think of accomplishing that is if I can make it so I can program in Ruby instead of one of the godforsaken languages natively supported. In general, my attempts towards this goal have fallen into three categories: Accessing Domino from Ruby as one might a normal database. The very-much-in-progress fruit of this is my Domino API for Ruby projec [read] Keywords: agent domino dxl ibm notes rich text xpages database eclipse java password properties server
193


In Between My Project and XPages
Thu, Mar 15th 2012 1:13p   Jesse Gallagher
Despite my grousing about the state of programming for Domino in general and Designer in particular, I'm still mostly a fan of XPages. I use it for my guild's web site and pretty much every new project at work. However, I haven't been able to crack migrating my main work database template over. Without getting too much into it, the point of the template is to create one database per project to act as a project web site listing online events with arbitrary registration forms and exit evaluati [read] Keywords: domino dxl notes notes client rich text rich-text xpages database java javascript server
132


Basic Eclipse Plugin Installation in Designer
Thu, Mar 15th 2012 12:12p   Jesse Gallagher
Since Domino Designer is based on Eclipse, one of the nifty advantages is that you can use some of the same plugins as vanilla Eclipse. That "some of" is a big caveat, since Designer's base isn't the latest Eclipse, so some plugins won't install, won't work, or will even cause Designer to stop launching until you manually remove them. So... proceed with caution. The first thing you have to do is to enable Eclipse plug-in installation, which is something you've likely done if you've inst [read] Keywords: domino application eclipse vm workspace
117


Quality of Life: Eclipse Color Themes
Sat, Mar 10th 2012 5:12p   Jesse Gallagher
Well, this is a nice quality-of-life improvement: the plugin Eclipse Color Themes, which (so far) works just fine in Designer (8.5.3). Having to go through every single editor type and manually pick each color for each code element every time I wanted to change a color theme was always a huge annoyance, particularly compared to other editors. Fortunately, that plugin handles it pretty well, though it unsurprisingly doesn't support LotusScript, so that's still manual. I installed it without pro [read] Keywords: domino lotusscript eclipse
306


How I Want To Use Domino
Wed, Mar 7th 2012 9:11a   Jesse Gallagher
From my perspective, there are three main problems with Domino: the limits, the client, and the server. Now, that's a lot of stuff... most of the product, in fact. However, the facts that I'm still programming for it and that my company's 16GB project-tracking database is as snappy as it was when it was empty attest to the core quality of the product. Off the top of my head, I can think of a number of things that make Domino salvageable: Reader fields. These are hard to beat and hard to fi [read] Keywords: domino ibm xpages database integration java javascript password security server sql wiki
205


Some Niceties of Implementing a Notes API
Mon, Feb 20th 2012 6:11a   Jesse Gallagher
There are a couple things about writing my Ruby wrapper for the C API that make it particularly fun, mostly related to getting to add abilities that I desperately wish were there in the normal APIs. Ruby-style (forall) looping. Anyone who has iterated over a NotesDocumentCollection knows the drill: set a variable to the first element, start a while loop, and make sure to set the variable to the next one at the end. Writing it one time isn't so bad. Writing it hundreds of times, though? It ge [read] Keywords: dxl ldd lotus notes rich text database java
116


Started Work on a Ruby Wrapper for the C API
Wed, Feb 15th 2012 6:13p   Jesse Gallagher
As I had mentioned before, I've been tinkering about with the Domino C API, specifically with Ruby. Although I'm not sure I'll actually have a use for it (from what I can tell, the C API is very tied to ID files and threads, which would make a multi-user web server thing cumbersome), I've decided to go for it and write a wrapper for the API generally based on the Java/LotusScript API. This is serving a number of purposes: It gets me off my (metaphorical) duff and in front of a text editor [read] Keywords: domino lotusscript java server wiki
283


This Dynamic View Customizer Is Getting Into Shape
Mon, Feb 13th 2012 8:12a   Jesse Gallagher
Since last week, I've made two nice improvements to my dynamic view customizer: I added some support for twistie images when the referenced DB is on the same server. The code assumes that the referenced images are image wells with at least two entries, but I can't imagine why that wouldn't be the case in practice. I vastly improved my handling of color columns. Previously, I had been resorting to hacky methods like hidden s read by JavaScript or surrounding s styled to take up the whole c [read] Keywords: domino css java javascript server xml
284


Enhancing xe:dynamicViewPanel For My Own Purposes
Thu, Feb 9th 2012 7:11a   Jesse Gallagher
I think I have my view rendering problem licked. To recap, I've been working on a way to show views in XPages that met a couple requirements: Entirely dynamic. Since this will be for a combined reporting site that will show views from customized project databases of wildly varying needs, I couldn't make any assumptions about view layout, categorization, or content. It should pull as much display information from the view design as possible. Fast. Some of these views have thousands of rows, [read] Keywords: domino dxl ibm ldd lotus notes notes client xpages database java javascript xml
329


Formatting View Content on the Web
Wed, Feb 1st 2012 8:11a   Jesse Gallagher
My current work project involves displaying arbitrary views from various databases into a combined reporting site (written in XPages). This has presented me with two hurdles: pulling in the data completely and accurately and then figuring out a good way to format it. The former problem is one of the few areas where it seems like "classic" Domino development has an edge: views render rapidly and, as long as you've configured the server to display lots of rows or add in pager controls, complet [read] Keywords: domino dxl ibm notes xpages css development dojo java server
269


Getting My Feet Wet With Ruby and the Domino C API
Thu, Jan 26th 2012 2:13p   Jesse Gallagher
My search for a useful way to use Domino as a database back-end for a Ruby front-end has continued and, more specifically, has continued to be difficult. I gave a shot to the Java CORBA API. Initially, that went well: after grabbing NCSO.jar from my Designer installation, enabling DIIOP on the server, and setting up JRuby, I was able to connect to the server using the host name, canonical user name, and password. Great! However, once I exported my app's Java model classes (modified to use Note [read] Keywords: domino lotusscript notes notes client R5 database development java password server
253


A Couple Handy Domino Java String Utils
Wed, Jan 25th 2012 10:12a   Jesse Gallagher
As most developers probably do, I have a grab bag of "utility" functions/methods I use across various projects, and I figured I'd post a few of the handier ones. The first is a basic XML-encoding function that just takes a string and returns something suitable for putting into an XML or HTML file. I've been too lazy to figure out if the standard Java library has an equivalent that doesn't involve creating an actual XML document in memory, so I just took the one I use for LotusScript and po [read] Keywords: domino lotusscript notes java xml
229


Confound It; That’s Two APIs Down
Sun, Jan 22nd 2012 9:13p   Jesse Gallagher
In the interests of getting crap done, as soon as I was finished with my previous post, I fired up TextMate and a couple Terminal windows to start writing a Ruby wrapper for the DAS API. It started out great! Wanting to avoid the minor hassle I ran into before with Ruby's built-in Net::HTTP library, I did a quick search for Ruby HTTP/REST libraries and picked one that worked well, named HTTParty. Before long, I had the rudimentary elements of a Notes API working, with classes to represent the [read] Keywords: domino notes xpages database java server sql xml
293


More Idle Complaining About Designer
Sun, Jan 22nd 2012 8:12p   Jesse Gallagher
As more and more of my Domino development has been with XPages, my databases have filled up with XPages, Custom Controls, and Java design elements. However, the more I use these, the more of a pain Designer becomes. It gets into its head on a regular basis the notion that it needs to recompile every single such design element - when I open the app in Designer (whether or not it was "greyed out" in the sidebar from before), whenever it "forgets" that I have it set to Automatically Recompile a [read] Keywords: domino xpages bug css database development exchange exchange java javascript office server sql
270


Keychain DB: Very Rough First Script
Sun, Jan 15th 2012 3:12p   Jesse Gallagher
I've had a chance to start on my Keychain project from last week, enough to put together a thoroughly rough and unmaintainable script to do the uploading. It has all kinds of horrible properties: it doesn't do the Keychain dump itself (instead reading from a hard-coded file containing a keychain dump from the "security" tool), it doesn't abstract away any of the Domino DAS access, it doesn't check for existing versions of the items, it doesn't handle field data types properly, and it even [read] Keywords: domino database properties security
247


A New Personal Project With Keychain and DAS
Wed, Jan 11th 2012 6:11p   Jesse Gallagher
With Apple's transition to iCloud, they're getting rid of Keychain sync. This is too bad, since that was one of the MobileMe features I actually used, loved, and never had problems with. Fortunately, all is not lost: worse comes to worse, I can pick up a copy of 1Password, which has the advantage over MobileMe of being cross-platform. But I'm a programmer, right? Why buy something - especially for $50+ - when I can just write something myself? My needs at the moment are fairly simple - I onl [read] Keywords: domino notes apple database mac password podcast security server
178


So here’s a strange new problem in my XPages forum app
Thu, Dec 29th 2011 8:10p   Jesse Gallagher
The other day, I set out to put some work into my guild's forum site. Immediately, though, I noticed that the main forum page was taking significantly longer to load on my development server than on my production server. Specifically, it was taking about five minutes to load, as opposed to about a second. That seemed... problematic. Looking at the profiler, I saw that the page was somehow making 38 million calls to Document.UniversalID, which was slightly out of proportion to the two forums lis [read] Keywords: xpages development interface java server
92


Pondering RSS Syncing
Wed, Nov 23rd 2011 11:13a   Jesse Gallagher
I was listening to the latest episode of Build and Analyze on the way home from work yesterday and, as I am wont to do, I started yelling at my iPhone when they started talking about Google Reader and the difficulty of syncing. Admittedly, at the end, they got to the fact that, even if you could do it technically, it'd be tough to make money off of providing an RSS sync server. That part is fair enough, but I still can't let the technical difficulties stand, and I've been thinking more about [read] Keywords: agent domino notes database google iphone server
99


That Counts as Progress
Tue, Nov 22nd 2011 3:28p   jesse
A while back, I described the problem I'm having in my guild-forums XPages app, which is that it very easily gets its environment out of whack, to the point where changing any design or data note from outside the XPages environment caused an "X is incompatible with X" ClastCastException. This improved gradually over time. At some point in 8.5.2, I started being able to modify data documents again without the problem. When 8.5.3 came out, it improved again: I can now replicate over changes fro [read] Keywords: ibm xpages application development eclipse java properties server
129


That’s Weird
Wed, Nov 9th 2011 7:35a   jesse
Yesterday, I started working on a small sidebar widget app using an XPage, after finding out that XPages can now (as of 8.5.3) be used in the Notes sidebar in the same way that Forms could before. It's quite a simple page, very Twitter-like: one text input field and then a list of posts. However, even though it's very simple, I ran into two annoying bugs quickly. The first of them is a Schrödinbug. I set up some code in the "onClientLoad" event to start a setInterval to do a partialRefres [read] Keywords: notes xpages bug css firefox javascript security twitter widget wiki
66


Trying To Escape From Designer
Tue, Nov 8th 2011 9:14a   jesse
Though I've grown to more or less enjoy writing Domino applications, I always feel like this is in spite of the tools, namely Designer. In a lot of ways, Designer has improved significantly over the last couple versions: as long as you ignore the speed, the Eclipse-ified Java and LotusScript editors are miles ahead of the antiquated previous ones, and it's handy to be able to switch to the Java perspective. However, so much else makes it a drag: It's a Windows app. I use a Mac, so there's [read] Keywords: domino dxl ibm lotusscript notes notes client nsd xpages applications database eclipse java mac server xml
104


So Here’s Why I Hate LotusScript
Sat, Oct 29th 2011 10:44a   jesse
For the most part, writing agents in LotusScript is the best way to go (at least when it can't be done in formula language), mostly for smoothness of interaction with the built-in libraries (no .recycle()) and because it's less prone to running into memory problems when other agents go wonky than Java agents are. That doesn't mean I have to like it, though. If there's one thing that drives me nuts about LotusScript more than any other aspect, it's its handling of arrays. This came to the f [read] Keywords: domino formula language lotusscript java
91


Sync
Tue, Oct 25th 2011 6:52p   jesse
So there's a new round of talk lately about syncing and the trouble involved, thanks to some changes in Google Reader's behavior and the desire to find a new safe haven for RSS syncing. The best example is, unsurprisingly, from Brent Simmons: Google Reader and Mac/iOS RSS readers that sync However, the whole time I was reading this article, my brain kept yelling at me, louder and louder as time passed: This is Lotus Notes! The system you're describing is Lotus Notes! It does syncing and de [read] Keywords: domino lotus notes notes client database google mac server
74


The Domino Data Service
Wed, Oct 5th 2011 7:22a   jesse
Though I don't have a use for it currently, I can't help but get kind of excited about the Domino Data Services in 8.5.3 and the Extension Library. If you're writing a normal Domino application - using either legacy elements or XPages - you probably won't have terribly much use for it. However, the really cool aspect of it is that it significantly smooths the process of using Domino as a backing data store for another front end written in PHP, Ruby, or anything else. This has always been so [read] Keywords: domino ibm xpages application java openntf password server
65


My next two favorite features of 8.5.3
Wed, Oct 5th 2011 5:07a   jesse
Since 8.5.3 has been out for about 24 hours now, I naturally rolled it out on both my development and production servers. Fortunately, my irresponsibility was greatly rewarded: the largest problems I've had so far were a change in the way Java classes are accessed in JavaScript (I could no longer just call methods on non-public classes defined in the same file as a public one, so I had to split them out into their own files... which is what you're supposed to do anyway) and a minor CSS change [read] Keywords: agent domino ibm notes css database development dojo java javascript properties server
43


My Favorite Minor Feature in 8.5.3
Wed, Sep 28th 2011 3:23p   jesse
I don't have access to the beta versions of new Notes/Domino versions, so I haven't been able to tinker around with all the cool new things that are slated to appear in 8.5.3, but that hasn't stopped me from getting pretty excited about some of them. The big-ticket items are clear: the new Domino Data Services and relational database access (through the Extension Library, which may as well be standard) could make practical very different ways of using Domino either as a standalone data source [read] Keywords: domino notes database exchange exchange
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Getting Domino LDAP to Work for Authentication
Thu, Aug 25th 2011 1:23p   jesse
Recently, I've been toying with the idea of setting up a couple extra services on my guild's Domino server - voice chat, non-Sametime chat, what have you - and I figured I should give a shot to LDAP authentication with the Domino directory for these. However, this is something I've never done, and the documentation is a little rough - most LDAP info on the web refers to non-Domino servers, while most Domino-specific information was written in about 1996. I'll leave out the depressing detail [read] Keywords: domino sametime archive linux server
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.recycle() in Back-end Java Classes in XPages
Tue, Aug 2nd 2011 11:12a   jesse
Though most of my Domino programming has been done in LotusScript (since it's one of the two "real" Domino languages), I had worked with Java here and there before diving into XPages, at least enough to know about recycle(). recycle() is a strange beast, a visitor from a non-memory-managed language popping up inside a famously memory-managed one. I get, conceptually, why it exists - since Lotus doesn't control the Java object lifecycle, Domino can never know when an object is garbage collect [read] Keywords: agent domino ldd lotus lotusscript xpages bleedyellow bleedyellow.com database java oracle




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