Today, this issue came up by a simple question: Do we need a Skype Chat for beginner level XPages developers?
If you are using Skype persistent chats, you would know their problems:
1. They are distracting. 2. They don't have search and memory. 3. They are not public.
So the discussion has moved over twitter...
First of all, my personal thoughts:
There is a great wall around XPages preventing newcomers. I am not talking about documentation or learning stuff. There are tons of it. I'm talking about questions and answers here.
Think about a rookie developer trying to learn XPages. He has only one address to go: xpages.info. There are tons of videos, samples and similar resources there. But when our rookie guy starts programming, there would be a great issue. There isn't any effective platform where you ask your questions...
But there is an XPages forum... It lacks some important features. We'll come to that...
Let's define 'effective'...
Think about a streaming discussion, like a chat. People ask questions on this persistent chat and get answers from listeners. Let's put some gamification to that. Authors of right answers would get some scoring. People would 'like' the answer and promote the contributor. It should be searchable and followable.
This can be achieved with a number of additions to watrcoolr, developed by Tim Tripcony for the latest OpenNTF contest. It would be something between watrcoolr and IQJam.
Somehow, another alternative came up with Bruce Elgort's tweet: "I wish more XPages developers would start using StackOverflow"
That sparked a discussion and instantly, many XPagers attacked to StackOverflow, asking and replying questions...
A customized watrcoolr would be extremely useful but comparing to StackOverflow, there are some negative points:
- It needs lots of development. - It needs to be hosted (OpenNTF? IBM?) - It needs to be managed and maintained (any volunteers?) - It's inside the bubble... Only WE, people following xpages.info or planetlotus.org will be able to see it.
Whereas;
- Stackoverflow is ready. No need to manage or maintain. Go and use it. - It has a great API. We may utilize it to embed our community sites to promote unresolved questions and contributors. - It's outside the bubble. It's open to thousands of JS, Java and JSF experts. XPages technology needs some visibility around the globe.
What is wrong with the XPages forum?
- Around thousand issues not resolved yet. - It's still inside bubble, hidden somewhere in developerWorks. - Contribution is not directly promoted. - It's not responsive and followable (no e-mail notification, limited RSS support, no site integration)
I am not suggesting abondoning XPages Forum. Either use an enhanced watrcooler or StackOverflow; it has to remain connected to XPages Forum. This forum will still be an entry point for many intermediate and advanced level questions. More importantly, XPages forum will be hosting XPages discussions. Because both ways will not provide a discussion platform and we still need that.
I want to hear more opinions about this. Which method will be more effective according to you?
1. XPages Forum 2. Enhanced version of watrcoolr 3. StackOverflow
If you also think StackOverflow is a meaningful platform to go; many XPagers (including me) started working on some basic widgets for SO.
Completely unacceptable ’Theft’ by LotusLearns company...
Sat, Apr 21st 2012 3:10a Serdar Basegmez I am blogging for more than two years. It's like a part-time job. I am doing this sacrificing my 'life' and 'time'. Many people attribute me and this is a great pleasure... But sharing my ideas or knowledge on the WEB doesn't mean that people can steal them 'COMPLETELY' without my approval even with an attribution! Yes, I have used the word "stealing" on purpose. Because this is what LotusLearns.com is doing! Kelley Smith, CEO of this company claims that she is doing this for Afr [read] Keywords: ntf
xpages blogging
development
planetlotus
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OpenSearch functionality for XPages.info...
Mon, Apr 16th 2012 3:28a Serdar Basegmez Today we have added a very simple feature to XPages.info site. It provides an integrated search functionality to be used with browsers. Here how to use it: For Chrome: 1. Open xpages.info site once. 2. Close your browser, reopen and at the address bar, start writing "xpages". Depending on how frequent you are using xpages.info, it will suggest the address in the bar. For me, "x" character is enough :) 3. Now you see a new instruction in the address bar: "Press Tab to search [read] Keywords: xpages community
database
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174
"Dotless i", toLowerCase and toUpperCase functions: Use responsibly!
Thu, Apr 5th 2012 10:33a Serdar Basegmez "Dotless i" problem is the most profitable area in my revenue stream :) Since the beginning of my career, I found and isolated dozens of bugs simply related to 'dotless-i'. I have already blogged about it couple of times, but let me sum up the problem. There are Turkish characters in our language, as in many others. But two exceptional cases are "ğ" (curved g) and "ı/İ" (dotless-i/dotted-I) characters. The first one is a whole different story that some linguistic experts sugg [read] Keywords: lotus
notes
R7
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xpages application
applications
database
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371
Going to XPages? Discover ’Disabilities-based’ development...
Fri, Mar 23rd 2012 3:36a Serdar Basegmez Yesterday, I presented at LUGTR XPages Workshop. We have heavily concentrated on transition to XPages development from traditional Domino programming. I am hearing a very common sentence more and more: "Damn! I can't even design a very very simple thing on XPages! Because of that, I'm not going to XPages..." There are many reasons that people with traditional Domino application development background fail in XPages. However this "XPages sucks" literature is not even close to those [read] Keywords: domino
lotusscript
notes
notes client
xpages application
applications
development
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325
My First Article on The View is online...
Fri, Mar 9th 2012 1:41a Serdar Basegmez My first article "Custom Controls — Basic Concepts and Techniques for Getting Started" has been published on The View magazine. This is the beginning of a series of articles about custom controls. In the first part, I have focused on differences between custom controls and subforms, basic usage of custom control properties and some features around reusability. You may follow the link above to read the article if you are subscribed to The View magazine. I have been blogging for more t [read] Keywords: blogging
properties
More XPages error-fun...
Thu, Feb 23rd 2012 4:04p Serdar Basegmez I really enjoy debugging mysterious error messages from XPages... Today, it's "field in note has wrong datatype": I have experienced this problem upon a question from my client. Save button (which only submits the form) results in this error. After analyzing the page (analyze=delete all elements except the button) I decided that XPages elements have nothing to do with the problem. It was computing the document before saving, so that must be the problem. Indeed, I analyzed the form ( [read] Keywords: notes
xpages
176
Googled my own blog... Again!
Thu, Feb 23rd 2012 3:12p Serdar Basegmez It happened again... I was dealing with a Sametime 8.5.2 IFR1 upgrade today at the customer site. I had this annoying error while upgrading Media Manager: "Not enough storage is available to process this command" I googled and browsed to my blog entry. This is a very common story for many bloggers. Some of us keeping blog as a personal memory. The only difference from others, we can use Google for our own notebooks :) BTW, I couldn't solve my issue this time. Because, in fact, I d [read] Keywords: ibm
lotus
sametime
google
java
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255
We need an Ultimate Connector for Everything...
Mon, Feb 20th 2012 1:44a Serdar Basegmez Did you see that old advertisement video from IBM? OK, Universal Adapter does not exist. But it was a funny video :) Anyway, it wasn't my topic. We have several content repositories within different IBM products. Connections (and LotusLive of course) has Files, Quickr (for Portal or for Domino) has Document Libraries, Domino has Teamroom, FileNet has Files again... The list goes like this. So far, we have different connectors for most of these repositories. I think it's the tim [read] Keywords: connections
domino
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notes
quickr
sametime
symphony
applications
eclipse
mobile
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295
XSnippets Upgrade: Commenting
Tue, Feb 14th 2012 5:04a Serdar Basegmez As Niklas blogged, we added a new improvement on XSnippets. At the recent version, registered users can add comments to snippets. A couple of months ago, I blogged about rating update on XSnippets. In a similar way, I also developed commenting within xInvolve Custom Control. The recent version (released on OpenNTF) contains single control for commenting and rating. I have decided to seperate these two functions to improve usability. Beta version of rating control has been deployed before. [read] Keywords: connections
development
javascript
openntf
profile
security
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