Categories
Day Job XPages

I love what I do, and what I do is XPages

So I’m sitting here in Midway airport in Chicago.  Kinda bored really so I thought I’d throw out some random crappy post because really, there’s probably not enough of those on the Internet.

I’ve been rather busy recently, traveling to Anaheim, Washington D.C, Las Vegas, Orlando, Chicago, and I’m shortly going back to Las Vegas.

Why am I doing all this travel?  For my day job, and let me tell you I have the best job in the world.  I get to work with completely awesome people like Mike McGarel and Devin Olsen. I’ve got the best manager in the world in Declan “Super Tech” Lynch and above him is John Roling, an awesome PHB! Our company does some incredible things, but that’s for another post I think.

Our development platform of choice is XPages.  Why?  Because it works and works well.  We literally run out business on applications developed with XPages. We can and will use other tech when appropriate of course.  We’re not blinded by XPages. But for the most part it’s been clearly the best tool for our needs.

My part of this and the reason for my heavy travel of late is I’m building Inventory tracking applications.  I’m still using the Notes client a bit but that’s going away to be replaced with XPages only functionality. I big piece of this are screens specifically designed for iPad.  I have a blue tooth scanner that works great and it’s used to track inventory and assist is in shipping and receiving operations.  I’m doing a ton of mobile development – not all of it great yet as I feel my way through things like mobile controls, bootstrap, etc.  I have a lot of people using this app and a lot on iPads. So far they seem really happy and we’ve tracked and shipped a LOT of material. Yay!

Let me just say that putting my core business logic inside Java Beans has been an absolute life saver. But we’ll talk about that later.

So I’ve been traveling to not only train various locations in using these applications but also learn about how each location is different.  What their needs are… what works for them… what doesn’t. It’s been great though I am looking forward to just being home and getting back into development.

Outside of the day job the extra travel has prevented me from going to IamLUG and I probably will pass on MWlug. I do want to get back to the Lugs but want to hang with the family as much as possible right now.

On the NotesIn9 front – this has slowed down the shows of course.  It’s kinda been a problem since last year.  The end of the DriveTo99 then IBM Connect then the day job stuff has created a backlog.  So it’s taking me a long time to get shows from contributors out.  I’ve never had that kind of delay before and I do feel bad about it.  I think I still have 2-3 shows in the queue from Brad Balassaitis and Paul Withers to get out and then I THINK I’m caught up but need to go through all my dropbox directories to make sure I’m not missing anything.  So hopefully Ni9 will pickup in a bit after this last scheduled trip in a couple weeks.

Next week I’m doing an OpenNTF webinar with Marky Roden.  I’m really looking forward to it but need to finish up what I want to talk about and demo.  It’s a “Getting Started” topic so it’s geared for beginners, but maybe there will be something intermediates might have missed.

So that’s my story.  Oh yeah…  I did get a Chicago HotDog

Oh and before I sign off I do want to give a huge shootout to Jesse Gallagher from iknowsomeguys.com who’s helping me with a pet project.  Don’t miss his blog at http://frostillic.us

Great… looks like the plane is a bit late.  Sadly it’s too noisy to do a NotesIn9.

So yeah, I love what I do, and what I do is XPages!

Have a great weekend everyone!

 

Categories
Community

NotesIn9 Live coming to the OpenNTF Webinar Series!

One June 4th I will be participating in a Webinar from OpenNTF.org called “Getting Started with XPages”.  I’m really excited to be presenting with Dr. Marky Roden.  It’s always nice to be able to present with good friends. In addition to being an outstanding developer Marky also happens to be a stellar presenter. So it should be a fun time.

I love doing what I can to support OpenNTF.  It’s a great community run website that is one of the best resources available to the XPages developer.  I don’t do too many webinar’s just because my schedule usually conflicts with hard dated commitments, but when Bruce and Niklas asked if we could do something for OpenNTF, well, how do you say no to that? They’ve both done a ton for the community.

Now – here’s your chance to influence the presentation.  This presentation is geared for the new XPager but we want to try to sneak in things that maybe the intermediate developer might have missed.  So in addition to looking at some getting started type code we want to have things like common mistakes to watch out for, tools you need, and more.

So if you have any suggestions for what you might want to see, or had a problem as you started learning and think it should be mentioned, or any other advice for a new and intermediate XPager  – well I’d love to hear it.  Either leave a comment here or send me an email.  My email address is on every single show. If I can’t get it into the presentation then who knows, it might just make a future NotesIn9.

Thanks so much and I hope you’ll be at the webinar.

 

Categories
Java Notes In 9 Podcast XPages

NotesIn9 114: Using Wrappers with XPages

In this show yet another NEW contributor comes on to share content with the community.  Today, Stephan Wissel, IBMer and blogger at wissel.net comes on the show for a discussion on a programming design pattern called “Facade” and how you might want to use this in your XPages development.

Categories
Mobile Notes In 9 XPages

NotesIn9 113: Learning to use XPages Mobile Controls

In this show NotesIn9 not only gets a SUPER new contributor, but it also gets it’s first Nerd Girl!  In today’s show Kathy Brown comes on to do a demo on using the XPages Mobile controls from the Extension Library / Update Pack 1.  These controls are also built into Domino 9.0.

In the demo she uses Designer to show you how to get started building a mobile app with the XPages Mobile Controls.

 

I hope you like it.

Categories
Mobile Notes In 9 Podcast XPages

NotesIn9 112: XPages Mobile Controls Part 3

In this show Peter Presnell returns to conclude his 3 part series on XPages Mobile Controls.  Today he’ll cover outlines and Data Views.

I also talk about the current OpenNTF.org Appathon Contest.  There’s a lot of prize money available so be sure to check that out as well.

 

Categories
Mobile Podcast XPages

NotesIn9 111: Mobile Controls Part 2

Peter Presnell comes back  today with Part 2 of his series on XPages Mobile controls.  In this show he’ll go through all the current controls provided with Ext. Library / UpdatePack / Designer 9 and define what they are and go through their key properties.

 

Categories
Mobile Notes In 9 Podcast XPages

NotesIn9 110: Mobile Controls Part 1

NotesIn9 is back!!  Yay!

In today’s show, Peter Presnell, a past contributor comes on to start a 3 part series on Mobile controls.  In Part 1 he will give us a very basic introduction to the concepts around the mobile controls.  In Part 2 he’ll go through each design element.

Categories
Notes In 9

NotesIn9 is Back!

Last week NotesIn9 had a problem where it was redirecting to some weird website and shortly after got flagged by Google as a site delivering Malware.

I had no idea until Sean Cull sent me a note asking if there was a problem.  Yep there was!  And what a problem it was.  Eventually I had to redirect the site to a quick temp page for the time being.

This happened the day before a trip to Orlando for the day job and I think the day IamLug started.  Not great timing.

My odds at fixing this problem myself were nil.  So I turned to Chris Miller from idonotes.com.  Chris is possibly the longest supporter of NotesIn9.  He and his Spiked Studio Productions have hosted my Ni9 WordPress blog for several years now. I truly appreciate that as I pretty much stink at WordPress.

Chris is also the key organizer behind IamLug so with that going on and me traveling this hit at the worst possible time.

From what Chris told me, code got injected via an old embedded flash player on one of my posts.  Ouch!

I want to thank Chris for his efforts in getting this fixed as soon as he did.  I really appreciate it.

All should be fine now.  If there are any problems please let me know.

Thanks for watching!

Now that my traveling is done for hopefully a while, I hope to get some long overdue shows out next week so please, stay tuned!

 

 

Categories
Mobile XPages

Next jQuery Mobile Hurdle

Ok, so I recently blogged about a problem getting jQuery Mobile working with XPages in Domino 9.0.  There was a lot of good idea’s and comments on that and I appreciated them all very much.  It turns out the best solution was provided by Sven Hasselbach with this post.

Now I already starting going down the Twitter Bootstrap path, which I was really liking, but I decided to take another look at jQuery Mobile.  And when I say “I decided to take another look at jQuery Mobile” what I mean is that Declan Lynch wanted to take a look at jQuery Mobile and drug me back kicking and screaming.  haha

So anyway, in no short order Declan had mobilized an internal app and I was playing with footers which can’t easily be done with XPages Mobile controls and working on a custom control for the header, content, and footer.  Just trying to get a feel for it really.

The first thing I really tried to do was get a feel for how viewScope might work.  Unlike Mobile Controls, where you work with Virtual pages, jQuery Mobile lets you work with real XPages.  I like that so much better!  Anyway, the first thing I tried to do is just put a computed field bound to viewScope and a button to update viewScope with the current time. Now the button is a normal XPages core control and I just wanted to do a partial refresh.

Clicking the button did nothing.  Tried partial refresh, tried full refresh. Nothing worked.  I didn’t even see any traffic from the browser.

I did some poking around for an answer, but not a lot.  So I thought I’d just post out here looking for some overall getting started advice.  I liked what I saw of jQuery Mobile but I want to keep Dojo working so I can use XPages controls.

Anyone have any getting started advice?

Categories
Community Learning XPages XPages

Treasure Map to Learning XPages and a NotesIn9 Episode Guide

A couple days ago, Stephan Wissel, created a “Mind Map” on what might be involved for an XPages Project.  I thought that was pretty cool.

Around the same time I discovered this XPages community on Google+.  I highly recommend checking that out and I’ll be talking about it more on future shows.  One of the moderators of that community is Rob Bontekoe. I’ve talked to him a couple times since joining that community and he’s a really great guy.  He provides a 4 day  XPages training course that can be given remotely or on your location.  As a supplement to that course he’s created some FREE courses on Java, Managed beans and even some neat videos on other topics like the repeat control and JSF LifeCycle.  Just some really amazing content from an original IBM Champion.  I had no idea about this material.

Now I’m not going to link to everything he’s done because for one thing I don’t have that kind of time and for another he’s already done it and more I believe.  Using the Mind Map website, Rob has created this really really cool “Map” of XPages learning resources. It’s been on the Google+ Community for a while, (see what you’re missing!), but I wanted to blog about it in case you missed it.

Rob’s XPages Learning Map

Now, I personally know a good idea when I see one. And one of my biggest problems with Ni9 is a lack of a good index / table of contents.  So I took a little time to try and create a Map for NotesIn9.

NotesIn9 Episode GuideMap

So please check that out.  Let me know what you think and if you like it or not.  If it’s helpful or not.  I think it might be but I’m not sure.  I’m really worried that I won’t be able to keep up with it as new shows come out.  So I thought about not publishing it but then thought, well I already did this much.  So I don’t know if I can keep up with it.  If people think it’s helpful I’ll at least give it a try. If there are any volunteers that would like to keep this updated for me and maybe prettying it up a little bit I would welcome the help.

Thanks!