2016 OpenNTF Board Elections Update - Contributor Vote Required
The 2016 OpenNTF nominations are closed.
Contributor Directors (elected for one year - 4 nominees for 3 positions):
Padraic Edwards
Patrick Kwinten
Fredrik Norling
Johnny Oldenburger
So - a ballot has been sent to all active registered Contributors. If you
have not received an email and are a contributor, please send your votes
anyway to ip-manager at openntf.org.
Member Directors - all elected for two years (by acclamation):
Serdar Basegmez, Developi Information Systems
Adam Foster, Oval
Jesse Gallagher, I Know Some Guys
Christian Güdemann, Webgate
Douglas Robinson, Prominic
In addition, the following Member Directors still have one year remaining
in their terms:
Oliver Busse - We4IT
Martin Donnelly - IBM
Nathan Freeman - Red Pill Development
Paul Withers - Intec Systems Ltd
The Board would like to thank all those who have presented themselves as
candidates this year.
OpenNTF Board of Directors - Nominations Still Open Through September 16
The call for nominations for OpenNTF's
Board of Directors is still open until September 16. Anyone who would like
to stand should submit their names, the type of post for which they wish
to stand and a candidate statement to ip-manager at openntf.org. There
are a number of initiatives already happening behind the scenes, so this
is an exciting year to be involved with OpenNTF.
Employees of member organizations may stand as a Member Director – with
a two-year term. There are five such board positions open for election.
Contributors may stand as a Contributor Director – with a one year term.
There are three such board positions open for election.
The terms of five Member Directors expire this October, Members whose
terms expire this year may, of course, run again for another two year term.
They include:
Serdar Basegmez
Jesse Gallagher
Christian Guedemann
Martin Rolph
Justin Hill
The terms of the three Contributor Directors expire this year. Again,
they have the option of running again. They include:
Padraic Edwards
Adam Foster
Fredrik Norling
Election schedule:
Nominations open until September 16.
Circulation of Candidate Statements September 16
Voting online from September 16 to 23rd
The winners take office on Oct 13.
OpenNTF Board of Directors – Call for Nominations
We invite anyone interested in participating
in OpenNTF's Board of Directors to submit their names to ip-manager at
openntf.org.
Employees of member organizations may be nominated as a Member Director
– with a two-year term. There are five such board positions open
for election.
Contributors may be nominated as a Contributor Director – with a one year
term. There are three such board positions open for election.
The terms of five Member Directors expire this October, Members whose
terms expire this year may, of course, run again for another two year term.
They include:
Serdar Basegmez
Jesse Gallagher
Christian Guedemann
Martin Rolph
Justin Hill
The terms of the three Contributor Directors expire this year. Again,
they have the option of running again. They include:
Padraic Edwards
Adam Foster
Fredrik Norling
Election schedule:
Nominations open until September 16.
Circulation of Candidate Statements September 16
Voting online from September 16 to 23rd
The winners take office on Oct 13.
Last Call for Passengers who want to attend the IBM ICS Developer Competition 2016
Dear Friends
Its so amazing to see that over 10 Teams
have registered to this "long term" competition. This means that
we have so far over 25 participant. This is very promising! I had also
the chance to see the topics, each team has chosen, but my lips are sealed
with a BIG SMILE!
But not only a BIG SMILE, also some
tears: The WebGate Team can not attend, because we have a conflict of Interest.
As Chairman of OpenNTF, Judge in the Contest and CTO of WebGate, this would
be unfair. But anyway. If you not a part of one of this Teams, this
day is the last day to register.
So please sign up today and
participate in the IBM ICS Developer Competition 2016
Have fun
Christian
Project Spotlight: OpenLog, XPages OpenLog Logger, XLogBack
For this month's project spotlight, I wanted
to highlight error logging. Firstly, it's worth making a clear distinction,
that the projects on OpenNTF help with error logging. But error handling
is a completely different topic and no framework, regardless of the language,
can ensure errors are appropriately handled for custom applications. Error
handling comes down to managing the process in which the error occurs in
a way that best supports the user and application, to ensure quality and
integrity of data. For example, proper validation on both server-side and
client-side would fall under error handling, but if the developer doesn't
apply validation correctly in the right places, errors won't be handled
adequately. Error logging is designed to aid support, not improve data
quality and integrity.
Domino has had logging in-built in its
core API for some time via the NotesLog class in LotusScript, corresponding
to the Log class in Java. This allows logging to a Domino database, an
email, a file or each agent's internal log (accessible via Agent > Log)
in Domino Designer. But like the core Java logging mechanism, many (and
possibly most) developers have chosen a more extensive open source solution
for Domino - Julian Robichaux's excellent OpenLog.
For anyone not familiar with it, OpenLog
not only captures logging from LotusScript and Java, but also JavaScript.
It captures considerable information, including client versions, user triggering
the error, access levels and roles, source of the error and stack trace.
This is invaluable for tracking down the actual cause of an issue and has,
in the past, allowed me to quickly identify the cause of an issue was an
upgrade to a user, when I wasn't even aware upgrades were planned. Logging
also allows document links to be added, to help identify document-related
causes. In addition, notification profiles can be set up and standard Domino
archiving processes can be utilised to keep database sizes manageable.
When XPages came along, a server-side
JavaScript version was created for TaskJam by Matt White, but the
project was not Apache-licensed, causing a problem for other projects that
wanted to utilise it. That is why XPages Help Application
included a Java library based on Julian's original OpenLog Java Script
Library.
But the opportunity for XPages-specific
enhancements increased as XPages and knowledge of the framework matured.
This caused its evolution into a separate project XPages OpenLog Logger,
by the same author, Paul Withers. XPages OpenLog Logger
supported easier use from SSJS, filtering of errors so the same error was
not logged for multiple phases of the XPages lifecycle, capturing uncaught
exceptions, greater configuration and flexibility using notes.ini or xsp.properties
and much more. It also allowed the library to be deployed within each application
or server-wide as an OSGi plugin. Full documentation has also more recently
been migrated to OpenNTF's Confluence server, in a specific space. The database
errors are logged to and form used have not been changed - it still uses
the original OpenLog project. But it brings a greater flexibility to error
logging.
For those utilising the OpenNTF Domino
API ( a growing number of developers), XPages OpenLog Logger comes
as part of that plugin, making it available to XPages, to other OSGi plugins
and applications, or even beyond Domino, in CrossWorlds.
But beyond the Domino space, Java developers
are used to a different standard error logging approach. Historically this
has meant log4j, but that has evolved into and been replaced by LogBack.
Serdar Basegmez has taken that library and integrated it as a separate
OpenNTF project, XLogBack, for
a more a more Java-ish way of logging. The documentation (available to
browse in the readme file on the Stash repository)
gives a nice table of comparison with XPages OpenLog Logger.
So whether you're still developing Notes
Client applications or using XPages, DOTS and going beyond Domino, OpenNTF
provides best practice options for developers from a variety of backgrounds.
If you're developing or have developed
a project with just print statements or no error logging at all, consider
working with either Serdar or Paul (or the other project chefs of XPages
OpenLog Logger) to leverage proper error logging. XPages OpenLog Logger
has already been integrated into projects like Resource Reservations Extended
and we would be happy to help include more robust error logging in other
OpenNTF projects. And if you are interested in the ICS Developer Contest,
having XPages OpenLog Logger or XLogBack integrated by another person would
constitute having multiple contributors, and therefore a team!
Build your Team for the IBM Collaboration Solutions Developer Competition 2016
Yes you should really think about participating
the "IBM Collaboration Solution Developer Competition 2016".
It will be fun and a real good experience.
Before I was the Chairman of OpenNTF,
I had the chance to build myWebGate with our Development staff. We where
a gang of 6 team members, but if you think 6 Developers... you would be
wrong. My Friend Peter was our project manager and delegated from the management
team to lead the financial aspects of this project like effort and deliverables.
My role was more Enabler and Architect then developer. And to be honest
behind the scene was Roman our CEO who had the role of the business sponsor.
He was also in a way part of the team.
During my time of building XPages Toolkit
and POI4XPages, I get a complete different view of what is my team, because
I figured out that best request came from outside of our development team.
To be honest for XPages Tookit and POI4XPages, the most important *team
members* are the developers who use the framework and builds the applications.
They are like the *Business Sponsors*. They know what they really want
(If you are using one of this project and you are not part of the corresponding
slack channel, join us today).
But now there is this absolute cool
IBM Collaboration Developer Contest, which you have to attend as a team.
Please rethink "Team". Because we are not talking about a "Team
of Developer".... No we are talking about a Team. And I think your
Team should contains the following type of members:
- Someone with a clever Idea or a real
world need!
- The one who can develop the code for
the clever idea
- A real good Tester
- Documentation? Yes documentation....
and there are People who loves to do documentation
So build your team,join the Competition!
Have fun
Christian
IBM and OpenNTF present: IBM Collaboration Solutions Developer Competition 2016
World IP Day
Earlier today I came across a tweet saying
that today is World IP Day.
Over the last year we've been looking at the role of OpenNTF, looking at
what Apache and Eclipse offer and considering how the changes in personal
websites and cloud source control repositories like GitHub and BitBucket
offer. These days there are a host of ways open source projects can be
made available to the public. But one of the key differentiators we identified
that OpenNTF provides is IP clearance of projects. This means projects
cleared for inclusion in the Apache catalog have been vetted to ensure
there are no intellectual property right infringements and that all contributors
are given due credit. Thanks to Peter Tanner for his tireless work over
the years as our IP Manager!
Maintenance during the weekend
Dear Friends
We will do some maintenance on the OpenNTF
Infrastructure, starting from Friday April 22. 12:00 EDT until Sunday April
24. 18:00 EDT. This will affect all the tools of the Atlassian Suite. Expect
that this services could be down for a short period. We will inform you
when all maintenance tasks has been done.
Have fun
Christian
Project Spotlight: JsonBeanX and Jackson4XPages
A search of OpenNTF projects for the term
JSON
will return a number of projects over a long period of time. JSON has long
been a key data interchange format, being language independent and not
requiring a fixed agreed schema. It is this reason in particular that has
led to it overtaking SOAP as a data transfer mechanism, enabling microservices
to be built and further developed without breaking existing interactions.
Anything that delivers JSON data can of course be access via (Client-Side)
JavaScript and, if client-side is your preferred approach and you're only
interested in consuming and not delivering JSON data on request, there
will be standard out-of-the-box approaches that you can leverage.
But for server-side approaches - whether
for consuming or delivering on external request - the options available
are various. When I initially developed XPages
Help Application some years ago,
the approach I used was to manually construct strings of JSON data. But
the Domino platform has opened up tools for leveraging this, particularly
in the 9.0.x timeframe with Domino Access Services and the com.ibm.commons.util.io.json
package. Domino Access Services provide out-of-the-box basic CRUD APIs
to access Domino databases, including Mail and Calendar. But DAS does not
manage validation or manipulation of data types. The com.ibm.commons.util.io.json
package provides low-level Java APIs to read to and write from JSON objects,
and of course it is also via Server-Side JavaScript, since SSJS classes
are actually Java classes under the hood. But every element of the JSON
data needs reading or writing individually, which can be verbose.
Following on from his session with Kathy
Brown at IBM
Connect, Julian Robichaux has
contributed a lightweight converter between JSON and Java, JsonBeanX.
This is just a JAR file that can be imported into an individual NSF and
avoids some of the security restrictions of other Java implementations,
which would need amendments to the java.policy (or java.pol) file or would
need the code adding to an OSGi plugin. Full details on how to implement
it are in the JavaDoc
documentation. This is designed
to convert between JSON and Java objects, but it's an added incentive
if needed to use Java instead of SSJS, to minimise the code you need to
write and avoid some of the pitfalls you might otherwise need to (re-)address.
I've attached a simple example in the
Java classes below. Within your XPages application, you would just go to
Java\Code and import Julian's jar file, like this:
Then it's just a case of creating the
Java code to use it. DavidJson is my Java class, which comprises a few
properties - name, age, date of birth and characters. In the Utils class
there is a method createBean() to create an instance of the class.
(In reality, this would be loaded from a Notes Document , ViewEntry or
multiple Documents/ViewEntries.) The outputJson() method then
uses just a handful of lines of code to return a String containing the
JSON data:
When passed to a Computed Field component,
the output is this:
Outside of XPages, the standard library
for translating between Java and JSON is Jackson
and Frank van der Linden is working on an OSGi
plugin, already on OpenNTF's Stash,
to wrap this for those who prefer something a bit meatier and can use OSGi
plugins. The second output is the same DavidJson Java object outputted
using Frank's
plugin. Again, it's just a handful
of lines of code.
The false parameter passed to
the JacksonWrapper tells it to output date/times as date/times rather than
converting them to timestamps. There are a variety of options for outputting
to files, FileWriters, OutputStreams or just strings (which I use here).
And beyond this there is a host of additional functionality from Jackson.
Look out for a full release of this project on OpenNTF in the near future
or download the source from Stash and get involved (developing, testing,
adding feature requests or more).
For a walkthrough of the code, here
is a YouTube video.
DavidJson.java
Utils.java