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Monthly Archives: May 2015

Thinking of AngularJS? Maybe it’s not all that and a bag of chips after all.

Posted on by Posted in AngularJS 6 Comments

For a little while I’ve been hearing from some respected friends that basically “AngularJS is Awesome”.  I’ve sat in some presentations…  seen webinars.. had Skype chats…. etc.  So it’s on my “Interest List” but I’ve not devoted any time yet to try anything about.  As I write this I literally know almost nothing about AngularJS from a practical stand point.

A while back though I did look for AngularJS information.  Specifically I wanted to hear negative opinions about it.  I wanted something to offset a lot of the Angular cheerleading that seems to dominate the conversation.  Because of course there is no one perfect technology.  Look at me – I love working with XPages but if you want a list of everything that sucks eggs about it I’d be happy to discuss that as well.  It’s good to have perspective on things.

At the time I really didn’t find much negative about Angular.  I didn’t spend a lot of time on it and my Google-Fu is usually pretty weak to begin with but I thought that odd.

So today I came across this article today that I wanted to share:

Why you should not use AngularJS

I found this article really interesting.  Is it biased or even accurate?  I’ve no idea.  But I wanted to share this for anyone like me who might have been hearing all this positive vibes about Angular and wanted some perspective.

 

Thank goodness for IBM Domino and XPages

Posted on by Posted in XPages 3 Comments

So Declan sent me this article  the other day.  Something from JSFCentral about the development of the website for a “Major” insurance company.  Really not much to it but what was rather interesting was the tools that they needed to build this website.

  • Dev Platform
    Eclipse, Java 6, Maven 3
  • UI
    MyFaces 2, Facelets, Richfaces3 and Tomahawk
  • Backbone
    Spring 3 framework
  • Database
    Hibernate, String JDBC, DB2, Oracle
  • Other
    Spring Integration, MongoDB, JAX-RS, AXIS, Dojo, jQuery, Freemarker, Blaze rules engine, Drools, Apache, OBM MQ Series
  • Deployment Platform
    JBoss AS5, Tangosol Cache Server

I wasn’t sure if I should say “Wow!” or “WTF?”  I admit that I don’t know what half these tools even are but dang that’s a lot of parts for a website. It’s not even Facebook or Twitter.  It’s “only” getting 80,000 hits a day which just doesn’t seem like a lot for the amount of tools and work a team of 35 people put into this.

I’m not suggesting that Domino and XPages could be used to built this site. Maybe it can and maybe it can’t. There’s not enough information to even guess at that.  But if this is the norm of non XPages websites it sure does make me appreciate what XPages gives us out of the box to develop applications and how easy it is to deploy any applications on the Domino servers.

Now I’m all for embracing and learning non Domino web techniques – but looking at that list I wouldn’t even know where to start.

There’s a lot of things I don’t like about Domino and XPages.  There’s just so many things that should be better. But I think for the next several days at least, I’ll just focus on all the good things that I do like about the platform.

🙂

 

UPDATE:  Vince had an interesting followup post here.

NotesIn9 176: Categorizing Repeat Controls

Posted on by Posted in Notes In 9, Podcast, XPages 1 Comment

In this show, brand new contributor, Bill Fox comes on to give a really interesting demo on Categorizing Repeat Controls.  He’ll show repeat controls with 1, 2 and 3 levels of categorization.  There’s a lot of other techniques in here as well. He’ll use custom controls with custom properties, View Navigators, Computed CSS stlyes and more.

Hope you like it!