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Announcing the third OpenNTF XPages Development Contest - Let's double the Prizes

Niklas Heidloff | 1:00:16 AM Wednesday, February 8, 2012

OpenNTF is happy to announce the third development contest on OpenNTF.Org 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.

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With this contest OpenNTF and We4IT want to further increase the number of XPages open source projects to help with the adoption of XPages.

Stefan Sucker, CEO of We4IT, calls for  the third entries to the third XPages Development Contest saying:

"For a quite a while now I have felt that the future of Notes applications has lain in the browser.  And over recent months this view has been supported by the amount of XPages development work that We4IT has been commissioned to deliver.  The majority of this work has been in transforming existing applications into modern web apps.

I know it can be difficult to learn new technologies; we have been down this road ourselves.  Now we would like to help encourage other developers in their own journey.

In the last OpenNTF competition, both the number and quality of the entries was impressive.  Ultimately it was these outstanding and innovative results that have led us to again, to exclusively sponsor the OpenNTF XPages
Development Contest"

Bruce Elgort, OpenNTF chairman, said:

"The developers who have entered the first two development contests have given the XPages development community an incredible wealth of controls, library controls, mobile, social and full blown apps. With the 3rd contest I see this trend continuing and expect to see a significant increase in the number of developers and entires that are submitted to the contest. Good luck to all who participate and a big thank you in advance from the IBM XPages community."

We ask participants to contribute XPages source code for 1. controls and 2. applications.

1) Re-usable controls can be custom controls or library/Java controls. Reusable controls have typically parameters to configure and use them in different contexts. The controls need to be documented to make them consumable by other OpenNTF developers. Especially for custom controls it needs to be documented which design elements to copy to use the controls in other NSFs. There are many good examples on http://xpages.info/contest.

2) Applications contain or integrate all necessary functionality for users to fulfill certain tasks. Examples are the IBM templates, e.g. teamroom, or other examples listed on http://xpages.info/downloads. Applications also need to be reusable, e.g. by externalizing all custom specific configuration, providing customizability options, documentation, etc.

Implementation: Participants can choose how to implement their applications. There are no prerequisites to use certain technologies other than that the solutions need to work in XPages. All contributions need to work on Lotus Domino 8.5.3. They can also require Upgrade Pack 1 or the latest XPages Extension Library from OpenNTF.

Awards and Recognition

There will be different prizes for the two categories. All prizes will be cash prizes this time. Winners can decide whether they want to receive Amazon vouchers or whether they want to get paid via PayPal.

1) Controls
The two winners of this category will receive $800 each.

2) Applications
The two winners of this category will receive $1600 each.

OpenNTF will also create videos and screenshots (if not done by contributors), blog about these controls and have them put on XPages.info as done for the first and second contest.

Criteria

We'll use the following criteria when judging the contributions:

1) Reusability, consumability and documentation
2) "Wow" factor and completeness of solution
3) Overall business value
4) Amount of work to build the submission(s)
5) New this time: Special consideration will be given to submissions of social and/or mobile applications

The judging will be done by OpenNTF again but we invite people from the community to participate in the judging. In that case they obviously cannot participate themselves and cannot judge submissions from colleagues in the same company.

Eligibility

Everyone can participate and submit nominations, with the exception of the OpenNTF Board of Directors. While members of the Board may not personally submit a nomination, other employees of their respective companies may submit. A contribution can be submitted by more than one person but the award would have to be shared between the submitters. Winners should also be aware of any rules that their employer, state or local company has regarding participating in contests and winning prizes. A nomination can be done by more than one person but the award would have to be splitted.

Prerequisites for valid Submissions

Any open source project may be submitted for consideration for this contest that has been accepted for either the Apache or GPL catalog on OpenNTF. All snippets need to be posted under the Apache license in XSnippets. The following points describe in details these prerequisites.

1. Authors need to be approved OpenNTF contributors, e.g. they need to be covered by an ICLA or CCLA (details).
2. Submissions have to be posted under one of the four accepted OpenNTF licences. For example for Apache submissions the Apache license has to be applied correctly (details).
3. Submissions must have been cleared by the ip-manager at openntf dot org so that they can be added to either the Apache or GPL catalog. Contact the IP manager if you need to use third party code.
4. Submissions will be evaluated on Domino 8.5.3 with or without extension library. Non-working submissions or submissions that judges cannot get to work will not be considered. No other product versions will be used for evaluation.
5. Submissions will be evaluated on the most common browsers Firefox, IE, Chrome and Safari (latest releases). If you're aware of issues of your submission in certain browsers please let us know.
6. Submissions need at least to provide two or three paragraphs of documentation, some screenshots and in the optimal case a short demo video (all in English).
7. All new project releases are eligible that have been created after the second contest ended (12/02/2011).

Submissions

You need to have the code on OpenNTF and send a mail to support at openntf dot org and ip-manager at openntf dot org (for IP clearance).

Schedule

June 3th 2012: Deadline for submissions
One or two weeks later: Announcement of winners

Promotion

OpenNTF would appreciate if you could help us to promote this contest.

Please feel free to use the banner graphic above or the following sidebar graphic and link to http://contest.openntf.org.

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Previous Development Contests

Screenshots and videos of the submitted controls of the first contest and the second contest are available on xpages.info/contest.

XPages Debug Plugin for Eclipse IDE now open sourced

Niklas Heidloff | 1:20:33 AM Tuesday, February 7, 2012

David Taieb and Dan O'Connor have implemented a debug plugin that allows debugging server side Java code in the Eclipse IDE without having to redeploy the plugins after changing them. This plugin is a new version of the first debug plugin which was provided as binary only. The new version is now open sourced so that it can be merged into the bigger project XPages SDK for Eclipse IDE from Nathan Freeman.

Watch this video to see the plugin in action and download it from OpenNTF.

From the readme:

<<
The IBM Lotus Domino Debug Plugin is an add-on to Eclipse IDE that makes it easier for developers to run and debug custom OSGi plugins for IBM Lotus Domino Server. This tool extends the Eclipse Debug Configurations dialog by adding new OSGi Framework options.

Starting in IBM Lotus Domino Server 8.5.2, XPages provides a toolkit for writing custom controls using OSGi plugins. Developers need to export their custom plugins from Eclipse and install them on the Domino Server file system before they can run and be debugged. These operations must be repeated every time a change is made in the code.
To improve productivity, the IBM Lotus Domino Debug Plugin removes the need for exporting and deploying the custom plugins by configuring the IBM Lotus Domino OSGi runtime to load the plugin classes directly from the Eclipse workspace.
>>

On OpenNTF: Workflow for XPages

Niklas Heidloff | 1:31:01 AM Monday, February 6, 2012


Phil Riand, Qian Liang and team have contributed a new project to OpenNTF - Workflow for XPages.



Read the following deck for a description of the project.



Workflow for XPages

Lotusphere Session eXtending Domino Designer and XPages including Samples on OpenNTF

Niklas Heidloff | 1:55:38 AM Friday, February 3, 2012

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

Use StackOverflow for XPages Questions

Niklas Heidloff | 1:04:51 AM Thursday, February 2, 2012

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.

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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.]