Guo Yi and Chen Yang Jun have prototyped an extension to the import and export tool. At some point OpenNTF used this tool to allow importing XPages custom controls into Designer (see old video). There were a couple of issues with this tool though that the new prototype tries to address.

The old version wasn't that visible in Designer. The new version can be launched via right clicking on an NSF project. The old version also used a browser to display the controls, the new one a native Eclipse UI. Additionally the flow in the old version was not natural and not all files/design elements were imported (e.g. no custom Java classes).

Below are some screenshots. Since Guo Yi and Chen Yang Jun work on this in their spare time feedback from you would help to get this finished. I'd think this would be a great addition to OpenNTF and provide a lot of value, now that we have a critical number of open source controls.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 1:24 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (19)

Today at the Lotusphere comes to you in Zurich, Switzerland, the IBM Premier Business Partner WebGate Consulting AG announced to open source the myWebGate-Framework on OpenNTF under the Apache license in June.

"Im Juni 2012 werden wir unser myWebGate-Framework als openNTF (Apache Lizenz V2) zur Verfuegung stellen. Bereits heute ist das myWebGate Framework bei TSS Africa im produktiven Einsatz. Dafuer wurden wir von IBM als Finalist fuer den Beacon Award 2012 ernannt." (English version)

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 9:46 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just a quick update. OpenNTF has received six submissions so far for the XPages Development Contest sponsored by IBM business partner We4IT. Links to these submissions as well as screenshots and videos have been added to http://xpages.info/contest.



Over the last weeks developers have also contributed other non XPages projects to OpenNTF:

Mail File Digest: The Domino add-in task scans all mail files homed on the server and produces a summary of each.  

soapgateQ: soapgate Q! for Domino is a web service based data access API providing the most important features of Lotus Notes Domino.

ASND Server Resource Facility: Allow Domino administrators to manage the transfer of file based resources that are available on the Domino Servers in their environment.

MailScan: Free domino server addin for scanning email attachments for viruses. Integrates your well known command line virusscanner in domino, vendor independent.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 2:30 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Patrick Kwinten has contributed a set of 14 controls that encapsulate LinkedIn functionality. Check out this short video.

Here are samples of the person and company controls:



Here is a list of all controls:

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 4:55 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Declan Lynch has created a new project - XPages System Alerts. Alerts can be defined in a central database. Application pages that want to use them need to embed a custom control and point to the central database. Users will then see the alerts when opening these pages.

Check out the short video.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 12:45 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Kyle Yu and Lin Tang have created a new project - Topology Graph for IBM Lotus Domino.

Here is their description:

The app can show the topology of a Domino comain. It can give Domino admins an overview of the mail routing topology.
The Domino servers in a domain are categorized by NNN (Notes Named Network) and shown as moveable nodes on the page. Each node represents a NNN.
The lines between nodes show the connections between the NNNs.
The arrows show the direction of the connections.
The numbers in the middle of lines show the weight of connections.
You can drag the nodes to move them. By clicking a node, another page will be opened, shown the detail server info of this NNN. By click the server name on this page, another page will be opened that shows the topology with the server in the center of the graph.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 2:24 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

So far we've received four controls and one application for the OpenNTF XPages Development contest sponsored by IBM Business Partner We4IT. Contribute your open source project between now and June 3th and have a chance to win $800 for controls and $1600 for full applications. Here are some ideas what types of controls and applications could be submitted (no particular order).

For controls you can check out the long list of controls developers submitted for the first two contests. There are also many Dojo widgets, jQuery plugins and jQuery Mobile controls that could nicely be wrapped up in reusable XPages controls. Stephan Wissel blogged about other ideas and some companies provide controls for other platforms, e.g. telerik and Devexpress.

One control which is not covered in these references is a generic data synchronization control to replicate data from server side NSFs to smartphones and make it available to WebKit based apps.

Other possibilities are sets of controls encapsulating functionality to access a social network, e.g. the LinkedIn controls.

Here is a list 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

If you have other ideas but cannot implement them, please respond to this blog entry and I'll add them to this list later.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 2:14 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (3)

I was just looking through XSnippets for IP issues (yeah, I know, they are only snippets – but read on) and noticed something that is a really common problem – code from blogs – with no permission for anyone to actually use it.

There are millions of code snippets that are posted on blogs all over the place. And, tt is very likely that the intention of the bloggers is that anyone looking at the code should be able to use it. Why else would the blogger post the code.

Most blogs say nothing at all about how the posted material may be used. Worse, some blogs, like blogspot.ca, state “All rights reserved”. Others rely one of the more restrictive Creative Commons licenses that don't permit commercial use. There is an IBM Lotus blog which restricts use of posted material to the personal use of the reader.

None of these situations is good.

Just because someone posts code, it doesn't mean that you can use it. Of course, you can argue that no one is going to sue you for using code that was obviously put there for people to use. Good argument. However, if your code makes it into your company's product, and if a large company with strict IP rules wants to either distribute that software or buy your company – it will be a real impediment to the deal if your code has unlicensed blog-derived code. Large companies want to make sure that all your code was written by you or was acquired under a proper license. And when you have code from blogs, based on code from other blogs, tracing back to get all the required permissions can become a nightmare. (I've been through it.)

So – my suggestions are:

- For those posting in blogs – add a line that clearly gives the reader permission to use the code for any purpose.
- And for those using code from blogs, ensure that there is some license or permission statement, and if not, email the author to ask for permission to use the code. If enough people started emailing for permission, perhaps bloggers would take a hint and clarify the matter at
 the time of posting.

Posted by Peter Tanner At 8:00 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

IBM champion Giuseppe Grasso is working on creating a new style for the OpenNTF.org site. The goal is to update all OpenNTF pages including XPages.info and XSnippets to the new OneUI style as used by the IBM wikis. Since that new version is not yet available Giuseppe has extended OneUI 2.1 that comes with Domino 8.5.3.

So far he has created controls that we can use in all pages and applied them to the home page and the projects overview page:

Home page
Projects page

Note: The OpenNTF logo is not the new OpenNTF logo.

Please let us know what you think.



Giuseppe is also updating the OpenNTF Facebook page regularly.

Thanks a lot for your help, Giuseppe! And also thank you Bruce Elgort, who provided great design input.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 2:40 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Phil Riand and I have created a new project which shows how to use a very powerful feature in IBM Domino 8.5.3. The project contains samples demonstrating how to create threads and Eclipse jobs from XPages to run longer taking operations asynchronously without blocking the XPages user interface or to run scheduled tasks.

Watch this video to see the sample in action (video has no tone).

An example is a task that checks on a scheduled basis for new messages in mailboxes, databases, social networks like Facebook and Twitter, etc. Server side code of an XPages application can then get the latest messages simply by reading the cached information from the task.

All samples in this project use a new feature in Domino 8.5.3. com.ibm.domino.xsp.module.nsf.SessionCloner can be used to clone a Domino session of the currently authenticated user. This allows developing threads that run on behalf of a specific user which can use the Domino Java APIs even after the user's HTTP session has expired. com.ibm.domino.xsp.module.nsf.ThreadSessionExecutor which leverages SessionCloner adds additional convenience functionality to set context like the current database, it handles session timeouts, etc.

The Eclipse jobs framework is a powerful framework used by Eclipse rich client developers. Eclipse jobs are essentially threads plus extra functionality like scheduling, progress monitoring, pooling etc. The XPages runtime supports these Eclipse jobs also server side since the necessary plugin comes with the XPages runtime similarly to the OSGi core framework.

In order to run the samples Domino 8.5.3 is needed. The extension library or upgrade pack 1 is only needed to check and display progress in an XPage via the xe:jsonRpcService control.

The Java code for threads and jobs can either be run in a NSF or as plugin. If run in a NSF the java.policy file needs to be changed to grant permissions. For plugins that is not necessary. Check out the project for more details.

These capabilities are advanced capabilities in addition to the 8.5.3 synchronization improvements as mentioned in Karsten Lehmann's blog:
From Phil Riand: "Synchronization no longer happens on the session itself, but on the page instance.  In short, it can now execute 2 different page instances at the same time, while it locks for postback calls to the same page instance and execute them sequentially."
From Karsten: "there will be a new database property called xsp.session.transient. This flag means that unique session objects will be created per request to the server and discarded right after the request ended. This is a first attempt to provide session less mode. If you use this option, then you can create one database with all the services and no synchronization will happen, as each request will have its own session object."

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 2:41 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

There have been some very interesting posts on open source licenses in the past few days – prompted by a complaint about IBM's strategy in integrating the Symphony development work with the OpenOffice project.  

What is interesting about these blogs is that they make good comparisons between the Apache (permissive) and GPL (restrictive) licensing paradigms.  Ian Skerrett leads off with a blog in which he takes issue with the claim that “LGPL … keeps developers 'honest'; the Apache-License 2.0 will not”.  Both Ian's article and Matthew Aslett's blog make a strong case that permissive licenses (Apache et al) are slowly displacing copyleft/restrictive licenses.  This is certainly something that we see in OpenNTF – where the authors of over 90% of our submitters have chosen to use Apache rather than one of the GPL family of licenses.  (And those who do choose GPL tend to have far more issues with incompatibility of components – but that's another story.)

Finally, the most comprehensive of the blogs is Douglas Heintzman,s explanation of IBM's strategy of transitioning Symphony development to the Apache-based OpenOffice project.  In developing his argument, Doug provides a good description of the viral mechanism that copyleft licenses (such as GPL) use to “enforce disclosure of code modifications” - and contracts that with the permissive licensing regime – and why the latter is “more attractive to corporate vendors, and facilittes corporate investment of resources.  

Well worth reading.

Posted by Peter Tanner At 1:49 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is a new project on OpenNTF: Organization Chart from Linoy K George and Gayathri Viswanathan.

"This database is designed and developed to generate organizational hierarchy chart based on employee's position in the organization. The chart shows the basic details of the employee, to whom the employee reports and also the employees who report to him."

Check out the short video.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 3:17 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Julian Buss submitted his HTML5 File Upload Control to the contest. Julian describes in his blog how the control has been implemented. Watch the short video to see the control in action.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 2:03 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Attendees: Bruce, Stuart, Sean, Elijah, Pete J, Brent, Corey, Justin, Peter T.


OpenNTF Meeting Minutes 02/09/2012


1. Approval of meeting minutes from 01/26/2012 - Approved.

2. Annual General Meeting - February 29th 11:00am EST Announcement to come from Bruce.

3. Taxes - Delaware March 1st tax deadline goal to have filed by February 17th. Delaware agency has website for filing taxes. Need to get website account information to submit. Corey and Bruce to submit.

4. Third Development Contest Update - Announced to community. Hopefully most successful contest yet!

5. Sponsored Webinars - Working with TLCC on sponsored Webinars. Would we charge? How can we publicize? Cost of the platform? LotusLive account - limit to users. Pete would look into getting an account. Sametime server could be used but we need licenses. Bruce with John on a plan.

6. Newsletter - Sponsored Newsletter. Similar to Lotus Usergroup. 70,000 members. Can we generate operating expenses for organization. Need to make sure we have a "Opt out" mechanism. Need to understand tax laws in terms of generating income and what is taxable.

7. Financial Update - Corey gave the update.

8. Server stability - Memory issues. Justin's monitoring software can not pick up this issue. Moving to get log files to IBM.

For agenda next meeting - Source control integration

Annex to Meeting Minutes for OpenNTF Board Meeting on 02/09/2012
The next development contest which entails:
1. A controls category with two prizes of $800
2. A app category with two prizes of $1,600
3. To cover these prizes, We4IT will provide $4,000 and OpenNTF will provide $800 plus up to an addition $200 to cover the costs for delivering the prizes

We have 9 votes yes with zero against motion passed.

Recorded by Elijah Lapson

Posted by Elijah Lapson At 10:51 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Attendees: Peter, Niklas, Corey, Per, Elijah, Sean, Bruce, John, Jullian, Brent, Justin.

OpenNTF Meeting Minutes 01/26/2012


1. Approval of meeting minutes from 01/05/2012 - Approved.

2. IP Manager update - IP contributions coming in Peter still scanning and approving. New contract in the works for Peter T via IBM Canada. Pete Janzen working on reimbursement for $1,200 of OpenNTF funds spent on IP manager during 2011.

3. LotusSphere Recap - Bruce - Lower traffic on the product showcase floor. OpenNTF woven in to the session by IBM staff. John - Booth used as a meeting point should we spend the time necessary to run the booth? Good coverage. Hit a saturation point. Mostly developers. Speedgeeking session people had not heard of OpenNTF. Attendance for OpenNTF session 165 people. Timing challenging to draw people. Option for a event sponsored by the PSC group at LotusSphere featuring OpenNTF. Focus on sessions including OpenNTF content demos at User group meetings. Demos to be hosted on OpenNTF Server.

4. Schedule Annual General Meeting - February 29th 11:00 EST. 1 Hour meeting. Bruce to work on the agenda.

5. Taxes - State of Delaware March 1st deadline. Rosalyn Elward helping out with filing. Corey send Financial info to Rosalyn. Federal return due April 15th.

6. Third Development contest - WeForIT willing to sponsor another contest. Ideas from the booth: Categories for contest: Snippets, Controls, Full applications. Different awards for different categories. Double the prizes have cash prizes to reduce complications in customs shipping etc. Extend the deadline make it 4 four months so we can have two contests per year. John suggested alternative categories. New release of applications. Connections themed contest. Invite people from the community to first round of voting. Start 1st contest in February - May

7. LUG Presence-  Richard Moy has offered OpenNTF a free pedestal at MWLUG on August 15-17, 2012, Pittsburgh, Omni William Penn Hotel.  If somebody is willing to staff it would be a good idea. In addition: Stuart: Happy to do the same for Social Connections III in Dublin, 11th May 2011. - Session instead of pedestal.

Niklas - OpenNTF presentations at LotusPhere comes to you. Suggestion of a calendar for usergroup meetinsg on OpenNTF. Possible Widget on OpenNTF. John to investigate.

8. Investigate using the source control RedMine on OpenNTF. - Source control on OpenNTF will respond and look into what it would take to implement.

9. For Agenda next meeting - Sponsored webinars. Newsletter. Site redesign. Meet with TLCC.

Congratulations to Stuart Blogger of the year Planet Lotus.

Posted by Elijah Lapson At 10:50 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Attendees: Bruce, Elijah, Niklas, John, Corey, Ed, Per, Pete, Julian.

OpenNTF Meeting Minutes 01/05/2012


1. Approval of meeting minutes from 12/15/2011

2. Financial Update - see statement below

$200.00 for OpenNTF stickers invoice from Bruce. $230.00 for shipping costs for OpenNTF contest winner. Motion to approve. Approved.

3. New application for OpenNTF Alliance Membership

Dalsgaard Data A/S - Talked about coming up with a communications strategy with alliance membership. Approved Dalsgaard Data A/S as new member. 4. Anti-trust policy vote - Amendment for approved language. 5. New Connections Site Update - http://xpages.info/MadeSocial.nsf/Home.xsp - Great new resource for the Connections Community. Need more content. UI needs finishing. Need a domain name. Want to purchase domain for OpenNTF. Want to show it to the Connections Team. Motion to allocate money for purchasing a domain name for the new OpenNTF Connections site. Motion approved. 6. Lotusphere - Session on Wednesday 3-4. Annual General Meeting 5:45pm-6:45pm Wednesday. BOF style could be used. Pedestal t-shirts for volunteers. 7. IP Manager Update - No good news for funding Petter Tanner position (IP Manager) at OpenNTF. Two funding proposals rejected. IBM continuing to pursue internal resources for use with OpenNTF Community. Notified by Pete Janzen of IBM OpenNTF funding not coming through. OpenNTF in dire straights based on lack of funding for OpenNTF. OpenNTF needs a commitment from IBM that they will support OpenNTF with basic resources. How can we get this message out to the community? 8. Marketing update - Ad Sales for after LotusSphere? TLCC ends in April. Crossware banner ended December 20th 2011. Booth promoting Ad space. Should be more Ad space on the new Connections site. 9. Annual General Meeting - Bruce will send out an agenda.

Posted by Elijah Lapson At 10:50 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Attendees: Elijah, Bruce, Niklas, John, Corey, Sean, Rene, Brent, Peter, Per, Justin.

OpenNTF Meeting Minutes 12/15/2011


1. Approval of meeting minutes from 12/01/2011

2. Contest Update - Very successful lots of high quality submissions. In discussions for the next contest with WEforIT. Ideas for new contest: Connections specific submissions. Open to all type of submissions. Xsnippets submissions. Suggested for a Control that works in a traditional web browser and on a mobile device.

3. Financial Status Update



How to display as three separate documents? Corey will post updates as applicable.

Receivables Outstanding

TLCC
Crossware

Need Budget for 2012 for IRS for Organization tabled until after LotusSphere. $69.74 for ordering checks. (approved)

4. Peter Tanner IP Manager Role

Bruce suggest allocating time for Peter for January and February. Suggested time of 3 hours a week for 2 months. $100.00/per hour $2,400.00 allotment. Update from IBM sent various emails conversations are happening. Asking for member contributions should be a last resort. IBM should have an update early in the next calendar year. Motion to approve funds. Motion approved. Brent working on longer term solution.


5. Lotusphere Update - Katherine E from Prominic has info about stickers about $200.00. Bruce generously agreeing to pay. 2 vendor passes given to staff the booth. Many volunteers to staff the booth OpenNTF will be well represented. Niklas and Bruce presenting the App session and a BOF session.

6. Notes/Domino 8.5.3 Upgrade pack release - Clarification needed from OpenNTF? Does it break existing ExtLib install? Going forward should I wait for the next update or install the latest version form OpenNTF?
Confusion around deployment if you are using the existing Extention Library from OpenNTF. Clarifying Blog post - on implementation.

7. IBM Connections on OpenNTF - Niklas
http://openntf.org/MadeSocial.nsf/Home.xsp

First version of a dedicated Connections site. Need a new logo and domain name. This will be a site to have Connections extensions developers to submit code. Developers see public instances how to get started and videos.

Posted by Elijah Lapson At 10:46 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mark Leusink contributed recently a debug toolbar for XPages. Below is a short video showing it in action.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 2:38 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

We've updated two pages on XPages.info.

XPages.info/resources lists the new resources, e.g. the books, StackOverflow, Lotusphere presentations, etc.



XPages.info/videos contains now free 100 learning videos and videos describing OpenNTF projects. A big thank you goes to David Leedy for his NotesIn9 and to GBS and TLCC for their X Series.

If there is anything missing, please contact us at support@openntf.org.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 1:16 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)