New Channels on OpenNTF Slack

Paul Withers | 3 days ago | Comments
Following this week's announcement about the end of Watson Workspace, the various members of the community asked for channels relating to IBM Collaboration Solutions / Collaborative Workflow Platforms technologies to be set up in OpenNTF Slack community. So following consultation we have channels for Connections on premises, Connections Cloud, Sametime, Domino admin, Domino dev and IBM Domino Mobile Apps. If you want to join, you can at https://slackin.openntf.org/ and then access the channels at https://openntf.slack.com.

For XPages there was already a separate community at https://xpages.slack.com/ and there are no plans to bring that thriving area into OpenNTF channels at this time. If you're working on XPages and are not yet in that chat, you can join by going to https://xpages-slack.herokuapp.com/.

If you're a new joiner and new to Slack, click on the word "Channels" and you get a list of channels you can choose from. Once you click on one, you're only browsing the content and will not yet get joined to it. To join the channel, click the link at the bottom of the chat. Clicking on the star under the bold channel name at the top of a chat adds it to your Starred channels. We would recommend everyone to click on their name, go to "Profile & Account" and set a display name. That ensures an understandable name appears when you ask questions.

It's great to see more IBM Champions already joining OpenNTF's slack and I'm sure this will help the breadth of conversation appearing in the general and random channels, as well as improving the excellent feedback members can get.

Become a NERD using Domino V10

Christian Guedemann | 3 months ago | Comments
Nerds are very cool these days - but, you may ask, what has a NERD to do with Domino V10? Should they not all bleed yellow? Maybe, but behind the acronym NERD is a very compelling technology decision! But first, let us jump into the acronym:

N = Node.js - A nonblocking JavaScript engine based on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine
E = Express - One of the most popular Node libraries, which turns Node into a REST API / HTML server
R = React (or, as I prefer, R = Really Cool User Interface) - React is a client JavaScript framework to build a brilliant user interface
D = Domino - Yes, Domino: something must be a store for all the data and even more (i.e. business logic)

Node.js, JavaScript... some of you may say "finally!", others not. Either way, Node.js is one of the most sucessful platforms and has with NPM the largest Open Source ecosystem. And, you may ask, why? Let me quote one of the German Node.js influencers, Golo Roden (@goloroden): solutions in JavaScript have to be simple and clean or they will be replaced by simple and clean solutions. Express is one of the best examples. Two lines of code and you have configured a server for static HTML files. Two more lines and a REST API is running.

Another popular framework is Passport. Passport provides integration with a huge variety of different identity and authentication providers. You want to use Facebook? With Passport, no problem: done with just a few lines of code.

Node.js is the glue between your front end and your clever backend services. A lot of integration problems are already solved by the power of this huge Open Source ecosystem. It makes complete sense to leverage this power for Domino application. In addition, with NERD, we have the potential to attract a huge community of JavaScript developers. We are talking about 4.5 million developers according to LinkedIn. And it seems that in the year 2018 JavaScript will be the most popular language!

Dear NERDs let's get ready for domino-db, the integration point for Node.js. Let's explore a whole new universe of possibilities!

What can you do until then:
1. Download an IDE that is good for developing Node.js application. As a Swiss guy, I recommend Visual Studio Code: https://code.visualstudio.com/
2. Do some baby steps to explore Express: https://expressjs.com/
3. Stay tuned for my next blog post

Have fun,
Christian

OpenNTF Board of Directors 2018

Paul Withers | 4 months ago | Comments
Following the call for nominations, the new board has been elected by acclamation.

The Member Directors have been returned for another two years:

Serdar Basegmez, Developi Information Systems
Adam Foster, Oval
Jesse Gallagher, I Know Some Guys
Christian Güdemann, Webgate
Douglas Robinson, Prominic

They join the other Member Directors who still have one year left of their term:

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

Two of the Contributor Directors chose to stand again:

Nina Wittich
Fredrik Norling

Padraic Edwards chose not to stand and we thank him for his work on the board. To replace him we have Graham Acres of Brytek Systems Inc., IBM Champion and member of the Cross Canada Collaboration User Group. With Domino V10 just around the corner, now is an exciting time.