On March 30th and 31st the IBM XPages team are hosting a workshop at IBM Dublin to deconstruct the XGallery demo from the IBM Connect 2016 Opening General Session. In case you need a refresher, you can see a video of it on this blog post from Luis Benitez. The application combined XPages on Bluemix, the Files service from IBM Connections Cloud and IBM Watson Analytics (the Visual Recognition service).

This is a unique opportunity to hear from the people who developed the demo and get hands-on experience, to give you the skills to build it yourself. Christian Guedemann will also talk about OpenNTF and how to get involved. There will also be a social event on the evening of 30th March.

The event is free, but attendees are responsible for their own hotel and travel. You can find more information and an agenda on the Slideshare slides below. You can register at http://ibm.biz/cognitive-domino, but places are limited and currently open only to Business Partners. If you have any questions, please contact Alan Hamilton - contact details are in the slid deck.

Unlocking the OGS: Building Cognitive Solutions with IBM Domino, Watson and Bluemix from Alan Hamilton

Posted by Paul Withers At 2:22 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

As we outlined in the blog post at the beginning of the week, we are reviewing project governance to try to increase adoption, usefulness and quality of the projects on the site. Following on from the survey aimed specifically at consumers (which will be open until Monday 21st March 9am GMT), we would like to ask contributors to complete another short survey specifically aimed around the projects you have delivered. Because of the number of responses already received for the consumer survey and because of some feedback already received, the planned date for opening the survey has been brought forward. The consumer survey will also be open for four weeks and will close on Wednesday 23rd March 9am GMT.

It's worth stressing that there is no intention to remove projects from OpenNTF. We're conscious that there are many years' worth of projects and that those projects may exist for different purposes. We're also conscious that not all contributors are equally skilled as developer, tester, documentation writer etc. The intentions in reviewing project governance are to allow us to better support our contributors and consumers. There is no intention to increase the burden for contributors. We want to increase the numbers, no deter existing or potential contributors. This is about making it easier for potential contributors to get involved in projects in whatever role (developer, documentation, testing etc), easier for you to leverage the OpenNTF infrastructure if it's useful for your projects, and easier for consumers to know how a project should be used. It's also about getting a better understanding of the feedback contributors receive and potentially increase that feedback to help raise your profile.

Thanks again for all responses to the survey so far. Because comments are limited in the survey and if you wish to include more extensive feedback, feel free to contact myself or another board member in the OpenNTF Slack chat.

Posted by Paul Withers At 5:31 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

2015 involved a number of infrastructure changes at OpenNTF: servers were upgraded, we updated the website content, nginx was placed in front of our sites to add SSL support and we are in the process of rolling out various Atlassian products - Stash for source control, JIRA for issue tracking, Bamboo for automatic building of projects and Confluence for documentation, most evidently for XPages Knowledge Base, thanks for John Jardin.

But we also started thinking about the future directions for OpenNTF projects. We talked with representatives from Apache and Eclipse to learn from their very different approaches to open source. With the increasing use of GitHub, at OpenNTF we need to think about how we are different from a website that just provides source control. Previous reviews have done something to address that and also improve the quality of projects, because virtually every new project is now Apache licensed. But in the last couple of years, both OpenNTF and the communities we support have also changed. First, when OpenNTF chose to extend to the wider ICS portfolio, Niklas Heidloff helped facilitate that by Websphere Portal projects being hosted on OpenNTF. And now many XPages developers are also stepping beyond the traditional suite of products and administrators are including cloud in their portfolio. A lot is changing, so it's a good time to re-evaluate where we are, where we want to be, and what we need to do to get there.

So over the coming months we have decided to review project governance and look at what can be done to increase adoption, usefulness and quality of the projects on our site. Of course this will also include some enhancements to the project and profile areas, as well as some other initiatives. The over-arching aims of the change to project governance are (in no particular order):
        - Increase downloads of projects on OpenNTF
        - Increase quality of projects (testing and documentation)
        - Reduce wasted time in installing projects that do not work
        - Increase confidence in using OpenNTF projects
        - Enable project teams to grow as required (by project chefs and potential team members)
        - Reduce “single point of failure” with projects
        - Improve defect management and resolution, while not over-burdening project chefs
        - Still allow scope for external support contracts
        - Identify but encourage “for personal / training use only” projects
        - Enable effective sun-setting of inactive / out of date projects
        - Increase reviews of projects
        - Improve ability to find appropriate projects
        - Increase contributions
        - Increase currency and enable “archiving” of inactive users

As the first steps towards that, we would like to gather feedback from consumers and contributors, because we want to ensure that the feelings we have about OpenNTF projects, the aims we have as a board and the direction we wish to take OpenNTF is one that fits the requirements of our users - both consumers and contributors.

We would encourage as many consumers as possible to answer a short survey about OpenNTF projects.

In a couple of weeks we'll also be releasing a short survey for contributors as well. Because contributors are probably also consumers, we want to split the two.

NOTE: The survey will be available until Monday 21st March 9am GMT.

Posted by Paul Withers At 2:55 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today the XPages team is releasing a new project on OpenNTF, namely, the XPages Fusion Application project. A fusion of XPages and Bluemix services, this application is designed to show the possibilities available to XPages developers using the power of Bluemix. You may have seen this application demonstrated over the course of the past year at IBM conferences or in XPages webinars ? Now you can download the application, examine the source code and learn how it was done. Not only that but by clicking on the “Deploy to Bluemix” button below, you can quickly deploy your own copy of the application to your Bluemix account. The same button can be found on the Github repository homepage and on the OpenNTF project homepage.

The procedure to use the "Deploy to Bluemix" button is as follows:

·        Ensure that you are registered on Bluemix, and that your account is active

·        Click the “Deploy to Bluemix” button

·        After the deployment page has loaded, login to Bluemix if prompted

·        Enter an application name

·        Choose the region, organization and space to which the application will be deployed

·        Click “Deploy”

Now sit back and relax as Bluemix will do the rest. It will create a new repository on http://hub.jazz.net associated with your Bluemix account, clone the XPages Fusion Application repository there, and configure the build pipeline of that repository. Then it will create a new XPages application in your Bluemix organization, connect the application to your jazz repository, create four new services instances, bind the services to your new application, copy the xpagesFusion.nsf to your new app, and finally your application is automatically started up.

The whole process should take about 5 minutes. You can then can try out your new XPages Fusion Application running on Bluemix and clone the jazzhub repository to your machine to examine the code or make changes to the application.

Note: This deployment will create a new application in Bluemix assigned with 512MB of memory by default and will create 4 new service instances. Users should ensure that this app does not cause them to exceed their available memory or service limits. The application and services all allow for a free monthly usage allowance, but take care to note the limits for each case if you wish to avoid any charges.

IBM Connect XPages OGS application
Some of you may have seen the demo of an XPages application during the second half of the Opening General Session at IBM Connect 2016 earlier this month. This demonstration application showed the integration of XPages, Connections Cloud and Watson analytics all running on Bluemix. If you missed it, you can check out the short video recap of the app below. And keep an eye out on OpenNTF in the future, as this demo app may be open sourced too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeTSb7PUZAI

Posted by Padraic Edwards At 8:45 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two weeks ago a new version of the XPages Extension Library was released live on stage during a session at IBM Connect 2016 in Orlando (slides available here). This release is a substantial one, containing many important updates, enhancements and fixes. Described below are the most notable changes, including an upgrade of Bootstrap, an ExtLibX update, responsive dialogs & pickers, new Bluemix utilities, accessibility enhancements and community contributions. For more detail about each of these changes and other changes not covered here, please consult the readme file within the ExtLib 16 release zip, which also includes a full changelog.

Bootstrap 3 Upgrade

The biggest change in this release of the Extension Library is that the Bootstrap version has been upgraded. This brings the Extension Library bang up to date with the most recent Bootstrap version, v3.3.6.

WARNING:  This upgrade does come with a warning as there is a small potential for breakages in pre-existing responsive XPages applications.  Refer to the ExtLib readme for more info, specifically the section titled “Bootstrap Plugin Refactoring”.

Bootstrap v3.2.0 was added to the Extension Library back in November 2014, bringing responsive web design to the XPages tool set. In this release, Bootstrap has been upgraded to the latest version, v3.3.6.

This upgrade includes a large amount of changes and additions that were delivered to the Bootstrap codestream.  A summary of some of the significant changes is as follows:

•        100s of CSS and JavaScript bug fixes and enhancements.
•        Carousel performance improvements.
•        Accessibility improvements.
•        Glyphicons updated to v1.9, adding over 50 new icons.
•        Normalize.css upgraded to v3.0.3, for improved cross-browser, cross-platform consistency.

For full details on all the changes, refer to each of the Bootstrap change logs, e.g. https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/releases/tag/v3.3.0

Bootstrap 4 Alpha in ExtLibX

Towards the end of 2015 it was announced on their blog that Bootstrap 4 was in the development pipeline. As part of its development process the Bootstrap team have released two alpha versions. It is not yet clear what the final release date of Bootstrap 4 will be, but the XPages team has already started the work to bring it to XPages.

For now this work will remain in the ExtLibX project, which will act as an incubator for this effort. A new Bootstrap 4 plugin has already been added to ExtLibX, containing the foundation of Bootstrap 4 support in XPages. So far the plugin is comprised of the Bootstrap 4 alpha.2 resources, some XPages specific CSS and JavaScript resources, a new ‘bootstrap4.theme’, and a number of new renderers for controls such as the Data View, Application Layout and Navigator.

The latest version of ExtLibX has also been incorporated into the latest ExtLib release (901v16), by updating the set of ExtLibX plugins contained in that release. This means that when you install the XPages Extension Library from OpenNTF, you can start experimenting with the Bootstrap 4 support that is currently under construction for XPages.

As well as trying it out, you can also contribute! The ExtLibX project has its own GitHub repository: https://github.com/OpenNTF/XPagesExtLibX. From there you can:

• Fork & clone the source code.
• Make changes within the Bootstrap 4 plugin.
• Test the changes on your Domino server.
• Create pull requests that can be reviewed by the XPages development team.

Once your changes are accepted, they will be merged into the ExtLibX project and you will
become part of the team building Bootstrap 4 support in XPages. Consult the documentation in the ExtLibX project to discover how to go about this process, if you are interested in contributing:
https://github.com/OpenNTF/XPagesExtLibX/tree/master/extlibx/resources.

Open source projects are defined by the strength and depth of the community that contributes to them. Bootstrap has a large community of developers and adopters from which it benefits greatly. We hope that the ExtLibX repository for Bootstrap 4 support can also be a resource for community open source development that will truly enhance the capabilities of XPages in the future. Don’t be afraid to get involved!

Responsive Dialogs/Pickers

For the Bootstrap themes the Dialog control, Value Picker control and Name Picker control have been refactored to make these controls fully responsive. Now when you utilise these controls on smaller devices, they will be responsively optimised for usage on small screens.

In the screenshots below, the left-side of the image shows the dialog/picker as it now appears on larger devices. Whilst the right-side of the image shows the dialog/picker as it appears on a small mobile device. Due to this work, the usability of dialogs and pickers on small devices is much improved.

Responsive Dialog


Responsive Name Picker



Hybrid Bluemix Context Utilities

Additional utility methods have been added to the Bluemix Context class/global SSJS object. These new methods are to facilitate XPages developers creating hybrid Bluemix applications.  The three new methods added are:
·        isHybridApplication() – returns boolean indicating if the app is configured for hybrid.
·        findHybridDatabaseName(String dbPath) – return formatted String that can be passed to ‘databaseName’ property of data sources.
·        atHybridDbName(String dbPath) – returns a Vector containing the server reference and dbPath. Designed to imitate the @DbName at-function.

Accessibility Work

A large number of accessibility fixes have been added in this release. The Bootstrap3_flat theme will be the chosen theme that provides an accessible path for XPages application development. This work improves the usability of XPages applications on web and mobile, enabling XPages developers to create applications that are fully accessible.

Community Contributions

There were two contributions from the community that are part of Extension Library release 16.

1. getXspProperty(String name) convenience method – Eric McCormick – This convenience method returns the XSP property with the given name.
2.    Bootstrap upgrade – Jesse Gallagher – Some of the code in this pull request was merged into the latest ExtLib release as part of the Bootstrap v3.3.6 ugprade described above.

Responsive XPages Webinar

Earlier this week the XPages team, in collaboration with TLCC.com and teamstudio, gave a webinar on Building Responsive Applications Using XPages. A topical session given the new ExtLib content described above, the webinar presented the details of the Bootstrap 3 upgrade and the work in ExtLibx on Bootstrap 4. If you missed it, the webinar was recorded and the replay is now available on the TLCC website, as well as the slides.

Posted by Padraic Edwards At 12:22 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Theo Heselmans announced the line-up of speakers and session for the upcoming Engage.UG event today. Engage.UG is the biggest European IBM related user group and always worth to attend. With speakers from all over the globe and sessions covering all kinds of current and interesting topics it is also one of the most popular events right after IBM Connect.

OpenNTF is thrilled to send our board members or people affiliated with the OpenNTF offerings to contribute sessions, too!

Below is the line-up of speakers related to OpenNTF. To get the full list of speakers and session please visit the Engage.UG homepage for details.

• Christian Guedemann, Bus05. Direct from the OGS "Transformation with modern Software in East Africa"
  and Str03. "OpenNTF - From Donation to Contribution"
• Serdar Basegmez, Dev01. "Back from the Dead: When Bad Code Kills a Good Server"
• Johnny Oldenburger, Dev02. "Expanding XPages with Bootstrap Plugins for ultimate usability"
• Paul Withers, Dev08. "Marty, You're Just Not Thinking Fourth Dimensionally": Troubleshooting XPages
• Martin Donnelly, Dev11. IBM Domino App.Next - New Possibilities
• John Jardin, Eme01. "The XPages of Things: Integrate Bluemix with Your XPages Applications for a World of Possibilities"
• Oliver Busse, Eme06. "XPages on IBM Bluemix: the Dos and Don'ts"

OpenNTF is also happy to be the "beer-sponsor" during the speed sponsoring on Wednesday evening right after all sessions ended on this first day of the conference.

"Beer is the currency of social" - Christian Guedemann

Posted by Oliver Busse At 11:36 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Did you know?
OpenNTF delivers another great resource for every XPages developer - in addition to the various offers the IBM ESS (formerly known as ICS) community already gives you:

The brand new XPages Knowledge Base!

We are very thankful to have IBM Champion John Jardin with us to curate this area - and of course you are invited to do as well!
As OpenNTF is the resource for open source software the Wiki follows the rules of sharing as well - be a part of it and contribute!

Posted by Oliver Busse At 3:29 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)