This show marks the 3 year anniversay of NotesIn9. In this show Mark Roden comes back on to talk about using JQuery to dynamically expand view content.
Today marks the 3 year anniversary of NotesIn9. I published my first real video on Repeat Controls way back in 2009 – 6 months after XPages was launched at Lotusphere.
Looking back those really seem like the Dark Ages of XPages. Learning was very difficult due to limited resources. We had a couple of great blog posts from people like John Mackey, Chris Toohey and Nathan T. Freeman. Then Declan Lynch really blew everyone away with an amazing 50+ article series on how to build an application. That was pretty much what we had for the longest time. That series was one of the inspirations of NotesIn9.
Fast forward to today and the XPages world is so bright and alive. There’s tons of new learning resources. We now have 3 books so far. Matt White does much better videos then me over on his XPages101.net site. We have some excellent courses available from TLCC.com. We have XPages.Info – the central hub of XPages resources. And of course we have applications, custom controls, snippets, and examples over at OpenNTF.org. Heck there are even XPages Cheatsheets now. 🙂
There are many “XPages XPerts” these days and they’re more then willing to share via blog posts or answering questions on StackOverFlow.com or the XPages Forum.
Wow! I think we’re now in an XPages Renaissance!
I’m proud of the small part that I had in all this. In that time NotesIn9 has contributed to the community over 15 hours of free XPages training videos from 12 different contributors so far. All the shows should be easily available on XPages.TV. (If you have any problems please leave me feedback on that site.)
Later today I’ll be releasing the 69th episode. Another XPages and jQuery show from Mark Roden.
There’s lots more coming! I have some big things planned if all goes well. I’m also talking to 2 potential new contributors that I’m really excited about.
As always a big thanks to all the contributors and also thanks to everyone who watches the show.
Happy Coding!
P.S. Next month I’ll be speaking live at MWLug. If you’re there please stop by to say hello!
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New XPages commercial on XPages.TV
Today I configured XPages.TV to play an “ad” in front of all the videos on XPages.TV. I want to test this to see if there are any technical problems. Please let me know by commenting here or leaving feedback at the XPages.TV site if you run into any problems.
Currently I know of one issue, if you do not have a good HTML5 browser, and do NOT have flash installed, the videos won’t work and it’s not prompting you of the problem. I THINK this is most noticeable with FireFox since FF doesn’t do html5 video correctly. They don’t support mp4 currently. FireFox should work if you have Flash installed. Also these should work on most mobile devices.
I need to figure out how to display a message instead.
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My XPages Brain Freeze
Well I screwed up yesterday… spent WAY too long on something in XPages because I still suffer from “Classic Notes Muscle Memory”. So I just thought I’d mention this in case someone else ever does this maybe they’re catch it quicker.
In XPages you can separate your code application from your data storage databases very nicely. This is something you really can’t do in notes client development and I find myself seperating logic and date quite often. In this example I have a NSF file with code needed for an iPad Mobile web application. But all the data is in a different database. Separating your code from your data is really seamless and nice to work with. This isn’t a big deal at all, until you get so into the coding that you actually forget where your data is.
I spent way to long yesterday on a piece of code in
Anyway it turns out that it worked fine, but I was simply saving it to the CURRENT database rather then the data database that I needed to. OPPS!! I just completely forgot about the separation.
So the moral of the story is always know where you’re data is supposed to go. 🙂
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XPages URL CheatSheet – Draft Version
This really isn’t ready, and I didn’t intend to publish it today, because it’s UGLY, but it looks like someone on the XPages Forum could use it so what the heck.
I’ve been working on an Online “CheatSheet” to help with working with URL’s in XPages. Basically how do you get the value you might need or are looking for.
Again this is rough, and I’m FAR from an expert at this stuff so I’ll just ask if people have particular code snippets for this kinda thing, please let me know and I’ll update this page.
here it is:
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Lotus Notes Baseball Ad.
As part of the XPages.TV redesign I wanted the ability to play a pre-roll ad at some point. Well you need to test that so I figured I needed an “ad” to play with.
This ad ran a little long so I won’t be using it on the site, but still, maybe you’ll get a kick out of it.
In this show I go over my new OpenNTF contribution – The XPages Media Library. This demo is basically a how to use and setup the application.
This morning I upgraded the XPages.TV site to a new codebase that is more of an actual application then the single XPage the old site was.
Last night I made my first ever contribution to OpenNTF by contributing this code. I call it XPages Media Library. This is a full application I’ve been working on for a while. The purpose of the app is to be able to present Videos and Audio Media to users and make it easy to find and consume content. I’ve wanted to make improvements for a LONG time.
While my focus is on XPages.TV, it’s designed to be able to host multiple “shows/categories” with multiple authors and contributors. So for example this could be used for an internal corporate training library where media files are separated by application or even department.
For the heart of this app I’ve used the Projekktor player as it seems to me to be the best video project out there. And I’m pretty sure I’ve seen all of them the last 18 months. 🙂 Projekktor carries a pretty nice GPL 3 license so that’s what the project is as I couldn’t use Apache.
Projekktor is an HTML5 based player with a flash fall back. A key to me is that the videos should play perfectly on most mobile devices, especially iOS devices.
I’ve not included any documentation just yet, I’ll be doing a NotesIn9 on using this very shortly.
There are still a couple of bugs I am working out, especially with the gravatars, and it’s FAR from feature complete so I hope to have updates coming somewhat regularly.
XPages.TV contains a “Feedback” button where you can leave a message for me if you have any problems with the site or videos playing. Please let me know if you have any problems.
Thanks!
This is actually a “repeat” I guess you would say. I’m posting this again because I realized that I never put this show on it’s own post. It was originally posted here which is kind of buried in a post about about an update to the cheatsheet. So I thought I’d give this a proper post for search engines and Internet tools.
This show is actually a part 2 of my own “XPages Jumpstart”. The first being “Introduction to XPages”
This 50ish minute show is very Demo heavy and discusses custom controls, UI Frameworks, Server Side JavaScript (SSJS), Dojo, Repeat Controls, Rendering, and even an early attempt at creating a “Custom Class” with SSJS. Many of the demos are also the basis for xpagescheatsheet.com and the demo app is downloadable from there as well.
Anyway – in case anyone missed this, here it is.
Congrats to the authors!!!
I’ve heard that this book is being delivered now from IBM press. It’s not on amazon just yet but it IS available via Apple’s iBooks store. At least in the US.
I’ve looked at the rough draft of this on Safari Books online, but just look at the list of authors to know that this is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
More on a future NotesIn9!