At the beginning of this year there were some discussions in the XPages community how to reach out to new developers and how to leverage other communities and web sites. As a result the community suggested to use StackOverflow for questions and answers.

After 3.5 months 378 questions have been created under the xpages tag. Even better, the answer rates are really good.




Personally I think this demonstrates well the power and strength of our community. StackOverflow has become a key part of the overall XPages community which also includes the OpenNTF open source projects and snippets, free videos, free webinars, lot's of blogs, the forum, the wiki, commercial education material, the three XPages books, etc.


A big thank you goes to all StackOverflow contributors who you can also find at the bottom of the StackOverflow page on XPages.info/so.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 1:27 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Weihang Chen has submitted a new project called Inline Attachment CKEditor to the XPages development contest sponsored by the IBM business partner We4IT.

The project contains a plugin to CKEditor which allows viewing and editing attachments inline like in the Notes rich text editor. For this plugin to work against existing Notes documents with rich text fields the project comes with a migration tool which extracts the attachments and puts them in separate documents.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 1:27 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

As part of the XPages Development Contest sponsored by IBM business partner We4IT, Weihang Chen has contributed a new project - Generic Tree navigator based on ITreeNode.



Note that you need FP1 to run it.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 1:20 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

The OpenNTF XPages development contest sponsored by the IBM business partner We4IT is still going on.

Contribute your open source project between now and June 3th and have a chance to win $800 for controls and $1600 for full applications.



So far we've received 16 submissions. While there are already quite a lot of controls, there are relative few applications. Applications contain all functionality end users need to fulfill certain tasks. Applications can/should provide configuration options but must not require developers to write code to use them.

Here is a list again of potential submissions for the applications category:

- Stream of entries from various social networks (in difference to Wildfire web based)
- Notes chicklets for web as web based navigator to apps
- Analysis tool to track how many certain web pages have been visited
- Notification system if certain Notes documents have changed
- Personal document library federating docs from Dropbox, Connections, LotusLive etc.
- Personal bookmarks federating from Twitter, Connections, etc.
- URL shortener app
- Extensions to the Information Retrieval app, e.g. mobile interface
- Gamification system for XPages apps
- Simple project/team task management app with mobile interface

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 1:39 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Serdar Basegmez has developed a new version of his project xInvolve Custom Control. The new version contains several new functionality, most importantly personal favorites and anonymous ratings. You can try these functions in the XSnippets application.

Watch the mini video to see the controls in action.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 1:46 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ulrich Krause has created a new project SSJS Extension which contains new @Formulas that can be used by server side JavaScript code.

@URLEncodeExt
@URLDecodeExt
@CancelPartialRefreshExt
@GetNextBusinessDayExt

Watch the mini video to see the formulas in action.

Here is the documentation for @GetNextBusinessDayExt:

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 1:45 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

After a long time (3 months I guess) a new set of features has been implemented on OpenNTF XSnippets site.

In addition to a couple of bug fixes, we have implemented an extended search functionality, OpenSearch support and 'My Favorites' feature...

Search Improvements
We have added some usability enhancement to search. See the video.

First of all, if you click a letter or number key on the XSnippets site, search bar will be automatically activated now. This is probably better than clicking a thin search box. The second improvement is the type ahead in the search box. Each character you entered fires a FT search on the server side and will return possible matches in a type ahead format (thanks to Tim Tripcony). If you select anything here, you will skip the search results page and go to the snippet directly.

OpenSearch Support
OpenSearch is an open standard for cross-site searching. Today, many browsers are supporting OpenSearch feature.

OpenSearch has two basic functions. The first is to declare 'how to search in my site' meta information to other sites. The second is more exciting: You can also announce that 'You can search keywords in my site, use this url...'.

We have added a simple link to add XSnippet Search into your browser's search engines. To do this, search anything to go to results page and click the link on the top right corner.


On Chrome and Firefox, you can also define a specific keyword for this search engine. Using keyword you can search XSnippets site from the address bar.

For Chrome, keyword can be entered on the "Add Search Engine" dialog when you click the link. To use the keyword, go to the address bar, type your keyword and press 'tab'. For Firefox, you should edit the keyword in the "Edit Search Engines" dialog. After you defined the keyword, type your keyword, a space and search terms into the address bar.

Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer also support keyword search.


Chrome


Firefox


Internet Explorer


My Favorites
We have also added my favorite feature to XSnippets. In any snippet, you will see a large star on the top right corner.



You have to be logged in to mark a snippet as a favorite. You can also see other persons that marked the same entry as favorite.


Once you logged in, we are placing a cookie on your browser. So next time you visit the site, you can see your favorites even you are not authenticated.

You can see your favorites in the left menu and "My Favorites" page.



Finally, you may use "Best rated XSnippets" view to mark snippets  'in-view'.

I hope you like the recent enhancements. I will explain some technical details later in my blog. We will also release the final database in the project page soon. Enjoy :)

Posted by Serdar Basegmez At 1:20 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Until recently, the “In Catalog” field in the Project and Release pages normally displayed “No”. This has now been fixed – at least for the individual project releases. So now you can tell, on a release by release basis, if it has gone through the IP verification process, and has had its documentation and functionality checked.



The "In Catalog" field for projects is still bogus - and will eventually be removed - as the verification process is based on releases - not on projects.  

Companies that have processes that vet open source for internal use or for use within their products, should stick to OpenNTF code that is in the Catalog. Such code is more likely to meet their vetting requirements.  

A little background here. In 2009, we went through a process to bring some rigor to the OpenNTF. We wanted to provide a means where users could have some assurance that OpenNTF projects had been checked to ensure that the code was licensed in a manner that permitted them to use the code, did not have components with conflicting licenses, and was submitted by those who had authority to do so. But we didn't want to hobble the ability for contributors to post their submissions. So, after a couple of months of community discussions, we came up with an IP Policy with the following set of rules:

– All contributors have to be covered by a contribution agreement (based on the Apache contribution agreements).
– Contributions must be under either the Apache 2.0 software license, or one of the GPL3 family of licenses.  
– We would have 2 Catalogs, one for Apache-licensed projects, the other for GPL/LGPL/AGPL-licensed projects.  
– And of course the IP vetting process was established

We have moved slowly to enforce the policy – partly to ease the transition. First we established the Catalogs, and vetted many of the projects so that they could be placed into them. Second, the infrastructure was changed so that you could not post a release unless you were covered by a contribution agreement. And now we have made it easier to see if releases are in a Catalog.    

Over the next few months, more changes are coming to the OpenNTF project and release pages – including the ability to have private working areas for you and your team to work on a project. More on this in my next blog entry.  

Posted by Peter Tanner At 10:06 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

As part of the XPages Development Contest sponsored by IBM business partner We4IT, Stephan Schramm and Christian Annawald have contributed a new project ITWU Exporter on XPages.

The project comes with a set of APIs to export data from Notes databases to XLS, RTF, PDF and HTML. These APIs are Java APIs that can be invoked from SSJS in XPages.

The project uses various other open source projects for the core export functionality:



Watch the mini video to see the exporter in action.

Here is a screenshot of the JavaDoc:

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 2:42 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

As part of the XPages Development Contest sponsored by We4IT, Fredrik Norling has contributed an XPage Standby Dialog Custom Control. The control brings up a busy indicator when partial refreshs are done from an XPage.

It's the same code as previously submitted as XSnippet but the new project allows now importing the control via the new Designer import tool.

Here is a mini video and a screenshot:

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 1:59 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)