Currently XPages integrates Bootstrap 3.2 as part of the Extension Library but as you know, Bootstrap 4 will be coming down the pike soon enough, given that there has already been an alpha release this past August. Bootstrap 4 will offer a host of new capabilities to spruce up your apps and so we need to get busy and weave these into XPages as early as possible. This is where ExtLibX comes in!

The Extension library has always had an incubation layer for new projects intended for rapid innovation on a particular area of interest and where the outcome, if successful, can migrate to the Extension Library and ultimately to the XPages product core itself (See Figure 1 for the XPages stack). So this week an initial release of an XPages Bootstrap 4 project has been introduced to ExtLibX. It contains the various design artifacts necessary for XPages to support Bootstrap 4, i.e. some renderers, CSS resources, XSP config files etc. It also contains a sample ToDo application that is already based on Bootstrap 4 and exhibits some of the new alpha capabilities.

Figure 1 - Layers of the XPages Runtime Stack

Our goal here is to add full Bootstrap 4 support into ExtLibX over the coming weeks and months so that XPages can have ready-made support for Bootstrap 4 when it is released. You can help by contributing code to the associated GitHub project thus enabling us to reach our goal faster. Getting involved is easy - the experimental layer has less rigid requirements for contributions than the Extension Library itself. As long as you are an OpenNTF contributor you can jump right in, make a contribution however big or small, and issue a direct pull request. It’s as simple as that!

Interested in participating? We have a new Slack channel dedicated to Extension Library discussions where you can ask questions and find out more about activities in this space. We hope to see you there soon!