Dan O'Connor and Graham O'keeffe gave at Lotusphere 2012 the session JMP301 eXtending Domino Designer and XPages. The session describes how to extend the XPages runtime and Domino Designer using Java, Eclipse and OSGi.

We've posted the deck as well as the samples in the project Simple Samples for XPages Extensibility.

Here are the objectives of the session from Dan and Graham.

Show how XPages and Domino Designer can be extended to match your needs and increase developer productivity
- Create new controls and other XPages artifacts
- Deploy artifacts to IBM Lotus Domino servers or IBM Lotus Notes clients
- Explain the Extension Library deployment model

Expose the technical architecture behind XPages
- Describe the technology being used
- Give an overview of how XPages is integrated in both the Domino server and the Notes client

Show an enhanced design time experience in Domino Designer
- Describe how tooling can be provided without the need for additional plugins
- Describe how advanced tooling can be delivered through Eclipse plugins

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 1:55 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

There have been discussions in the community recently how to reach out to new developers and to leverage other communities and web sites. In this context StackOverflow came up.

StackOverflow is a programming Q & A site that’s free. Free to ask questions, free to answer questions, free to read and free to index. It's also a well established site with a huge community around it. Google often seems to rank search results from StackOverflow higher which might be because of the good quality of entries. StackOverflow has great functionality to rank entries via user votings, moderation and reputation points and badges for users.

Several XPages developers have already started using StackOverflow. We created a new tag xpages so that other XPages developers can easily find XPages related questions. Please use this tag when you ask your questions. StackOverflow also contains a lot of other useful information for XPages developers, e.g. questions tagged with Java or JavaScript.

You can subscribe to the tag to get email notifications about new questions or you can use the new page on XPages.info:

http://xpages.info/so

The new page contains a list of the most recently asked questions and at the bottom a list of the key contributors.





StackOverflow can be used for practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. For discussions please use the forum.

[I've implemented the new xpages.info page via the XPages Social Enabler which use the StackOverflow REST API.]

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 1:04 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

A couple of weeks ago a new set of functionality was added to the XPages Extension Library. Developers can now write their own REST services for IBM Lotus Domino and IBM XWork Server using the open source project Apache Wink.

"Apache Wink is a simple yet solid framework for building RESTful Web services. It is comprised of a Server module and a Client module for developing and consuming RESTful Web services."

From the documentation (Extension Library REST Services.pdf):

<<
A custom Wink Service is the most advanced type of REST service. You use the open source Apache Wink project to define your service. Your servlet is contained in a plug-in that is deployed directly to Domino s OSGi framework. This means your service is not tied to a single database. It can access any data you choose and represent it in any format you choose.
...
A custom Wink service ... handles HTTP requests to a URL in one of the following formats:

http://{host}/api/{servicepath}/{resource}
http://{host}/{database}/api/{servicepath}/{resource}

Unlike a custom database servlet, a custom Wink service is not tied to a specific Notes database. When handling a URL of the second form above, with a {database} segment, the service can use the specified database context, but it could refer to any database on the server.

A custom Wink service is defined with the Apache Wink framework. Apache Wink is itself an implementation of the JAX-RS specification. Both Apache Wink and JAX-RS are now included with the extension library.
>>

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 1:38 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is a new Social Business API Explorer available on IBM Greenhouse. From there you can try the REST APIs which are in the Extension Library and Domino 8.5.3 Upgrade Pack 1.

The API explorer also shows how to access IBM Connections. Read the documentation for more details.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 3:33 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

The XPages development team has uploaded a new release of the Extension Library that contains new functionality as Phil describes below PLUS the document library template updated to XPages !

From Phil Riand:

<<
This release integrates major fixes, based on the comments/requests we got in the past month. Plus, it has all the fixes we needed for the Lotusphere live demos :-) Finally, it also includes an attempt to fix the IE8 dialog behavior. Please, let us know if you still see issues with IE8.

On the social side, we integrated some feedback we got at Lotusphere. As an example, look at the twitter sample page, and you'll see the options we added to cache the tweets for 60 secs without calling back the Twitter server (of course, the 60sec can be chenged, and the same behavior can be applied to the other services).

Thank you for the great feedback, and the positive strokes, we got at LS!
>>

Please note that the right release was only uploaded on 01/27/12 at 9:00 AM EST. The zip file in the same release document yesterday was a wrong one.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 7:53 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

I blogged some time ago about different types of XPages developers. One type of developers are Java developers who use the Eclipse IDE to build their own extension libraries which can be deployed as OSGi bundles globally to Domino servers. While this is not as easy as building apps and controls with Designer it provides more capabilities and allows easy usage in multiple databases.

These custom libraries use the XPages Extensibility API. I provided some time ago simple samples showing how to use this API.

Nathan Freeman brought this now to a new level. His project XSP Starter Kit has many more samples and more sophisticated samples.

Additionally Nathan shared some code that makes it really easy to set up an Eclipse IDE for XPages development: XPages SDK for Eclipse. With this project you don't need the Expeditor toolkit. There is also a wizard to create your own extension library plugin. Read more in his blog.

When you develop plugins in Eclipse you can directly debug them (often) without having to redeploy them. Check out the Debug Plugin and watch this video.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 3:07 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

During the session Bruce and Niklas demonstrated the following apps:

XSnippets - Serdar Basegmez, Frank van der Linden, Bruce Elgort, Niklas Heidloff
Social Enabler - XPages development team
JDBC - XPages development team
Mobile Address Book - Mark Hughes
Twitter Controls - Henning Schmidt
Mobile Contacts and Reminders - David Marko
Help - Paul Withers
Mobile To Dos - Mark Hughes
Mobile Admin - Ferhat Bulut
Mobile Navigator - Lars Buntrock
Lotus People - Mariusz Jakubowski
Event Signup - Michael McGarel
WatrCoolr - Tim Tripcony
XBlog - Keith Strickland
View PickList - Mark Hughes
Search and TagCloud - Frank van der Linden
Java Charts - Naveen Maurya
ZK Spreadsheet - Dennis Chen
ReCaptcha - Marco Dreher
Select Database - Lars Buntrock
Uni-Form Controls - Mariusz Jakubowski
PDF Exporter - Rami Muurimaki

Posted by Bruce Elgort At 6:19 PM Location Orlando, FL | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Social Business Online system used the poll control from Ferry Kranenburg. From the 'making' document:

<<The Poll Widget utilizes an XPages Poll Custom Control available on OpenNTF.org. This poll was submitted by F. Kranenburg and provided a great base for us to deploy a polling application. The custom control was further customized to store results into a Domino document.>>



The online system also used the XPages Social Enabler for the Twitter integration:



Ryan Baxter used in his Social Gadgets session the event signup app from Mike McGarel.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 5:43 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Kevin Cavanaugh talked this morning in the Lotusphere Opening General Session about OpenNTF's success and IBM's commitment to the XPages community.





Sorry for the poor quality of the pictures.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 8:55 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Please join us at the OpenNTF Birds-of-a-Feather session which will be held on Wednesday, January 18 at 5:45pm in the Swan Toucan 2 room. This has always been one of my favorite times at Lotusphere where many of the community application developers come to talk about their projects, OpenNTF and app dev. Please consider joining us for this 60 minutes of open source and community centered goodness. Will we see you there?

Posted by Bruce Elgort At 6:29 PM Location Orlando, FL | Permalink | Comments (0)