Call for Nominations for OpenNTF Board of Directors

Paul Withers | 2 weeks ago | Comments
With Social Connections just around the corner and the Collabsphere agenda recently announced, it's the time of year when we issue our call for directors.

There are four Member Director posts up for election this year. Any employee of a Member company is eligible to apply and the posts run for a two-year term. The following Member Directors terms are currently expiring:

Martin Donnelly - IBM
Paul Withers - Intec Systems Ltd
Oliver Busse -  We4IT
Nathan T Freeman - Red Pill Now

The terms of the three Contributor Directors are also expiring. Anyone with an ICLA or CCLA can apply for the post, which has a one-year term. The current incumbents are:

Nina Wittich
Fredrik Norling
Graham Acres

Anyone interested in standing submit their names and a candidate statement to ip-manager at openntf.org.

The election schedule will be:
- Nominations open until 20th September
- Voting from 21st September to 27th September
- Winners take office on 3rd October

Collabsphere 2019 Beauty Contest

Paul Withers | 2 months ago | Comments
Yesterday Richard Moy announced a new contest to provide a modern user experience for DMA to a traditional Notes template.

After contest in recent years for Connections Customizer and XPages, now is the right time to engage with LotusScript and Formula Language developers and re-energise that community around open source.

There are many developers who never made the jump to XPages and may not make the leap to the App Dev Pack. But IBM and HCL's launch of DMA has brought an additional entry point to Notes Client applications. HCL's work on iPhone and Android (tablet and phone) DMA apps with expand that reach across the two main mobile platforms. And with V11 the lightweight client is likely to bring Notes Client applications to any modern browser. Applications built with traditional design elements, LotusScript and Formula Language can have a greater reach than ever before. And OpenNTF is still here ready to embrace those open source samples to wow users and educate developers.

But most client applications on OpenNTF have not had a facelift in a decade. And the facelift given to the core templates is not one that works outside the Eclipse client. The world has moved on, expectations have changed, and it's time for applications to modernise as well. Technology is not a barrier to user experience. Just because it's Notes doesn't mean it can't be fresh, as Theo Heselmans showed with his Wine Tasting App. Paul Withers also delivered a session at Engage earlier this year on modernising applications including adding a DMA interface to the XPages Extension Library database. There is a blog post going into more detail.

So while you're waiting for the template to be selected and the start of the contest, take a look at these and think about innovative approaches.

Once the contest starts, there will be people available to act as mentors for teams. And the template itself will be packaged with the relevant license and notice files, plus starter markdown documentation file, ready for final deployment to OpenNTF. If teams want a GitHub repository setting up under OpenNTF for source control, we can do so. We also advise on issues templates / feature request templates / CLA process integration on GitHub.

Engage-ing With Our Community

Paul Withers | 4 months ago | Comments
Nearly half of the OpenNTF board members were present at Engage - Paul Withers, Oliver Busse, Jesse Gallagher, Graham Acres and Serdar Basegmez. Hopefully everone had a good time at the showcase reception on Tuesday evening we co-sponsored with HADSL. We had a round table on Tuesday morning that was very well attended, with a lively discussion. In the build-up we posted seven poll questions on Twitter. Thanks to all who got involved, though because of technical challenges the questions were only posted during the opening session of Engage.

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The results reinforced the theme of the round table, that the developer tools that will be used for development against Domino in the next decade will be different to those for the last decade. First off, we stated Domino Designer - enhancement or replacement - was out of scope of the round table. In terms of the rise of exposure to other development tools, this is already happening with sessions at Engage on Docker and more. But many have yet to be familiar with tools and techniques that are standard outside of the yellowverse. This was reinforced with responses around Maven, Gradle and npm. Although many had some experience (particularly of npm), few considered themselves familiar enough. This isn't surprising considering many confirmed they came from a citizen developer background. There are a lot of educational resources available, but they are not specifically targeted at our community and don't provide a simple single end-to-end tutorial taking you from zero to hero. But there was a strong experience of Java amongst the audience, as well as for XPages - not a surprise. There will be a lot of interest in the future Java domino-db module - hopefully integrating with proton and hopefully available centrally, like other Java SDKs, on places like Maven Central. In terms of proton and gRPC itself, there seemed not great understanding of performance metrics vs HTTP. Maybe this explains why so few have tried the app dev pack and may prefer to stay with more familiar options for REST services like XPages.

In terms of XPages itself, the final question to our audience confirmed that many would feel open sourcing XPages would be something they would welcome, and more than expected said that they would be interested in getting involved, although technical knowledge is of course a key requirement. What the future or best outcome on XPages will be, it's too early to know. PrimeFaces has been raised by some as a preferable framework, though not widely.

Regardless of XPages, Java or Node.js, Notes Client development has had a resurgence. And that option - probably the clearest RADD option - now supports mobile and, potentially in the future, web through the lightweight client. Sametime has a renewed focus as well, and it's worth reiterating that OpenNTF has always supported projects for Sametime as well. Once the deal closes, Connections is also expected to receive increased focus and we support projects for that too. It's best to finish our review of the round table with a tweet from Graham Acres, "We encourage members of the #dominoforever community to join and contribute. It doesn’t have to be your own idea. Join an existing project. Write documentation. There are lots of opportunities to help each other. @openntf at #engageug"

Before we finish, we would like to wish a speedy recovery to our chairman Christian Guedemann.