The crazy few that attended our IamLUG
presentation in St. Louis already heard this, but because the live streaming
didn't work, it turns out that I get to make this announcement twice.
A few weeks ago, the mighty Philippe
Riand and I were discussing some of the missing ingredients from Xpages.
While Xpages gives Domino developers unprecedented power and flexibility,
many people (including we here at GROUP) were struggling with some of the
constructs that are part of the basic nature of the Notes client. @Picklist,
.DialogBox, Mail Address Fields, computed subforms, and even just keyword
aliasing were turning out to prove quite a challenge to implement over
and over in every XSP project that we engaged in.
Tim and I had been working feverishly
on designing and building a collection of reusable controls that would
behave as closely as possible to the traditional UI elements of the Notes
client. And as it turned out, we were not alone. IBM had too been facing
the same challenge, and members of the Xpages team all over the world had
been working on similar concepts, in between fixing bugs to get 8.5.2 to
ship quality.
Philippe and I agreed: "this seems
like a lot of redundant work for us to be doing. Surely there's a better
way to get this done." IBM was already planning on releasing
their toolkit on OpenNTF, so we had the option of waiting until they did
all the work, and then just reusing it like everyone else. But we're
in a very big hurry, and I wanted to get access to some of these controls
just as soon as possible. We also had a slightly different objective with
many of them that required 100% consistency with the Notes client behavior,
so while IBM's design for a dialog box required that you put the dialog
contents into the container at compile time, we needed to be able to determine
the contents dynamically at runtime. (Note: they knew exactly how
to do this, of course. It just wasn't a requirement for them where it was
for us.)
So I asked my boss if we could join
forces with the Xpages team on this effort. We'd have to do something unusual
for GROUP, because we would explicitly be tasking full-time resources during
regular hours to the production of an open source result. But in the end,
we agreed that being able to work with the components that much sooner
was worth sharing the results, and thus we moved forward with IBM with
all speed.
The official beginning to this project
was Monday. And I am thrilled to tell you just SOME of what it includes,
as components that are both drag & drop in DDE, and declaratively through
SSJS...
1) InputBoxes and @Prompt
2) Aliased keyword lists
3) View-driven Custom Picklists
4) Address selection fields & buttons
(using the full Directory API, no less)
5) @DialogBox
6) Computed Subforms
7) Draggable "framesets" with
computed contents
8) Multiple styles of Outlines that
actually read from Outline design elements
9) Dramatically simpler OneUI implementation
10) Scrolling Dojo Grids driven from
back-end data sets like a Notes view
11) Tag Cloud
12) Simple User Bean for Directory Info
13) Sametime Presence Awareness
14) Dojo Layouts and Events
15) Calendar Views (yes, calendar views.
I said it.)
I'm not going to tempt fate by announcing
a delivery date on my blog, but I can tell you that you'll need Notes/Domino
8.5.2 to work with all these features, and that our objective is "very
soon after 8.5.2 is available." We're as excited as ever to
be working on this stuff, and we think that when you see it in action,
you'll be excited to.
These videos are made of win
Wed, Feb 1st 2012 9:30p Nathan T Freeman It has long been my opinion that good software
designers should understand the basic economics of trade. Ours is a highly
specialized practice, and it produces an absolutely staggering surplus
when we trade. But this can be very difficult to understand unless you
grasp the concept of Comparative Advantage. (Understanding Asymmetrical
Information is also a good idea, but let's save that for another day.)
Because of the absolutely marvelous
title, I stumbled upon these videos from Prof [read] Keywords: ntf
RAAWWWWRRRR!!!
Tue, Jan 10th 2012 11:00p Nathan T Freeman There's some tuning left to do, but I wanted
to get this out to the world before Lotusphere.
I've created an XPages
SDK for Eclipse RCP, so you can
install the latest version of Eclipse and easily set up Notes or Domino
as your target platform for your Java code. I assigned myself the task
of documenting this internally for GBS in January, and I realized that
I could spend a day documenting it, or spend two days writing a program
that would do it automatically.
It was really n [read] Keywords: domino
lotusphere
notes
ntf
xpages apple
eclipse
java
mac
openntf
65
A thought experiment
Sun, Dec 11th 2011 10:50p Nathan T Freeman In this time of vibrant political debate
in the US, I am frequently confronted by the notion of the social
contract. I find this idea
very challenging; both to accept or to refute. So I created a thought experiment
that sums up the issue for me...
Let us hypothesize for a moment that
you are a slave. In your captivity, you are permitted to procreate. Your
owner proposes the following:
"I will buy your unborn child in
exchange for an extra meal for you and your spouse each day. [read] Keywords: ntf
exchange
exchange
wiki
36
Do not settle
Thu, Oct 6th 2011 12:10a Nathan T Freeman Forget what you know about Apple products.
Learn from Apple's founder. "You
are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."
You will be missed, Steve. [read] Keywords: ntf
apple
50
Welcoming our newest colleagues
Thu, Sep 29th 2011 10:48a Nathan T Freeman If you read this blog, you've probably
heard by now that Synaptris
is part of GBS. I'm very pleased
to welcome our new colleagues.
As it happens, my team has been working
closely with Synaptris engineers for several months now. We tapped them
to work on our Dojo Grid control for surfacing Domino views presented in
Transformer apps. They have done a spectacular job. We're looking forward
to deepening the integration even further to leverage their expertise in
content searching and [read] Keywords: domino
ntf
xpages applications
dojo
email
integration
67
The ultimate Domino Designer performance improvement for XPages developers
Mon, Sep 19th 2011 10:10a Nathan T Freeman If you're an experienced XPages developer,
chances are you live in the Source tab of the XPages editor. But even if
you live in that editor, you'll notice that various
things seem to slow down Designer
with mysterious causes.
If you're willing to give up some of
the bells & whistles, like drag/drop from the Controls Palette, custom
editors for Properties, or icon cues on the Outline, you can switch from
the XSP editor to the native XML editor using the following preference
se [read] Keywords: domino
ntf
xpages properties
xml
54
True then, true now
Wed, Aug 24th 2011 6:43a Nathan T Freeman Economic
reality hasn't changed.
We'll miss you, Mary Beth. But the world
needs a serious UX effort put into 3D modelling software. When you leave
it to code slingers, you
get this. Please end the suffering. [read] Keywords: ntf
interface
43
April 24, 2002
Sat, Aug 6th 2011 9:43p Nathan T Freeman Name that speaker....
The congress and
the president will shift radically towards expanding the size and scope
of the federal government. This will satisfy both the liberals and the
conservatives.
Military and police powers will grow satisfying the conservatives.
The weflare state, both domestic and international, will expand, satisfying
the liberals.
Both sides will endorse military adventurism overseas. This is the most
important of my predictions.
Policy changes [read] Keywords: ntf
policies
security
