07/03/2014

On OpenNTF: xspless - a LESS CSS Builder for Domino Designer

LESS (Leaner CSS) is a dynamic stylesheet language that allows you to use variables, nesting, functions (and more) in your CSS file. LESS files can be compiled into plain CSS file. xspless is the name of a new project that Jesse Gallagher created. It is a LESS CSS Builder for Domino Designer. From the documentation:

"This is an Eclipse builder plugin for Designer. By installing this plugin, right-clicking on an application, and choosing "Add/Remove LESS CSS Nature", it allows Designer to automatically compile LESS files to normal CSS versions. It matches two types: stylesheet resources with names in the form "foo.less.css" (because Designer automatically appends the ".css"), in which case it creates a file named "foo.css" next to it, and file resources elsewhere (e.g. File Resources or WebContent) with names in the form "foo.less", in which case it creates a new file next to it named "foo.less.css" (to avoid overwriting similarly-named normal-CSS files)."

In short: if you add a mystyles.less file to the WebContent folder, Domino Designer will automatically (when the application is "build") create a mystyles.css file in the same folder containing the compiled CSS version of the LESS source file. The download comes with the full source of the project: it also is a good example on how to extend Designer's build process.

A picture named M2

07/02/2014

On OpenNTF: PC Config - easy inventarisation of hard- & software

Dominic Shields just released v0.23 of PC Config. This Notes client application can collect all types of information from the PC it runs on with a single click. It allows you to easily get an overview of the hard- and software in your organisation. Out of the box it shows you the collected information in various views (by OS, CPU, RAM, User, Drive space, etc.). It can also create (Excel) charts from the data it collected.

Examples of the information it collects are:
  • OS, CPU, RAM, Hard disk (usage)
  • Network drives and configuration (IP, subnet, DNS, etc.)
  • Installed software (information retrieved from the registry)
  • IBM Notes version installed
  • Internet Explorer version installed
  • Printers

Note that, as the name already indicates, this application runs on a PC only. The screenshots were taken using a Windows VM running on my Mac.

A picture named M2

07/01/2014

Latest Release of XPages Extension Library Improves RDB Support

The 7th 9.0.1 release of the  XPages Extension Library is now available on OpenNTF. Besides providing a number of fixes for existing features, this release focuses on improving support for using Relational Databases as a data source. First and foremost, the Relational Database plugin has been moved out of ExtlibX and into the main Extlib branch. This now means that when you install v901_r07 of the Extension Library or subsequent releases, relational database support in XPages will be installed by default. Enhancements to Relational Database support include the following

- JDBC Driver Plug-in Wizard in Domino Designer - This feature simplifies the steps needed to creates an OSGi plugin wrapper for a JDBC driver
- Improved Logging with RDBMS - Increased number & quality of logging messages for debugging the RDBMS support in XPages

Detailed information on Relational Database data source enhancements can be found in the Release Notes. These enhancements, along with the addition of the Apache DBCP support for connection pooling in the 5th 9.0.1 release, improve XPages developers ability to work with relational data.