Domino Interface

Thanks to Lisa and Darren Duke, I will be presenting at ATLUG on May 19, 2016 on combining my two favorite open source frameworks, Twitter Bootstrap and Dojo, to create widgets that your can use in your web-based application. This presentation is not XPages specific. The presentation will be held at the IBM Technical Exploration Center in Atlanta. So if you are a web developer using or thinking about using Dojo and Bootstrap come join me or to just listen to me rant and rave. IBM Corp  (Building A) 6303  Barfield Rd.,  NE Atlanta ,  GA   30328 Technical   Exploration   Center Creating Bootstrap Widgets Using Dojo Twitter Bootstrap is one of the most popular responsive CSS frameworks available. Dojo is one of the most comprehensive and powerful JavaScript framework available. However, Bootstrap only comes with jQuery-based widgets by default. But if you can only combine Bootstrap and Dojo together, you as designers and develo pers w...

We are fortunate enough to have Ed Brill speak at our April 11th GRANITE meeting coming up next Monday. If you are in the area and would like to have a chance to meet Ed Brill and talk more about the direction of Domino please join us at the April 11th meeting. In addition to Ed Brill, Mike McGarel from Czarnowski Exhibits will be presenting on UI design which has a direct impact on the success of social business software and Jose Blanco from Mercury Consulting who will talk about real examples of how Social Business is being used in corporation to help their organization grow. For more information about GRANITE and the April 11th Agenda, go to: GRANITE Web Site . You can now find GRANITE on facebook in addition to our Linkedin site. So if you are a Chicagoland area user, developer, administration, or IBM professional join us and build the GRANITE community.

RIAPalooza 3 is currently opened for registration. If you are interested in interface design and would like to see some really cool stuff, come to RIAPalooza. The cost of the conference is $20.00. I missed the early bird registration of $10.00. Too busy with MWLUG 2010 and customers. The conference is a one day event in Chicago on July 23rd. This conference will open your eyes on what the world is doing in user interface design and how advanced some of the user interfaces are. And unfortunately, it also shows how behind some of the Lotus technology really is. http://www.riapalooza.com/index.html

RIAPalooza 3 has just been announced. It is going to be on July 23rd in Chicago. What is RIAPalooza? It is a one-day conference in Chicago on the latest of Rich Internet Application design, user interface design, and user experiences. So if you are interested go to their web site. Registration is not opened yet, but soon. http://www.riapalooza.com/

I have not been blogging regularly still I have been so busy. I am hoping that I can get back into blogging and twittering soon. Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to meet with Don Norman who is retiring from Northwestern University next year. Don focuses on technology and user interaction and is a major guru in the design industry. As an engineer by background, it has take a few years for me to look at developing applications from the user perspective and not from the view of an engineer or programmer. The focus on user interaction and design is so critical that it can make the difference between winning or losing a project. Case in point, we recently won a project by focusing solely on their business and the needs of the users and how they need to interaction with the application. Lotus should be happy to know that this was another win for Lotus technology, Domino. As a technologist it is hard but necessary for us to realize that technology is secondary. I see too many times c...

Lotus Notes is now prettier with the Eclipse wrapper, but making a functional user interface is not about looking pretty. Google's interface for their applications is not as pretty as Lotus Notes. It is simple but logical. Though Lotus Notes now has a nicer looking interface it still has things that are not logical and layout incorrectly for the end user. For example is contact synchronization. You would thing that if you have to synchronize your contacts with your blackberry or other mobile device that you would go to your contact database and there would be a button or link to click on to start the process. That would be the most intuitive approach. But NO!!!! In 8.02 you need to go to your mail file. I understand the reason it is done that way, but come on it is not that hard to have a button in the contact database to start the process. Same thing in Notes 8.5, if you need to go to the replication page if you need to force a contacts synchronization. These are the litt...

As I was building the Midwest Lotus User Group Conference web site, I became more and more frustrated with what is required in developing a web site on the Domino platform. It is always becomes a cluge of multiple programming techniques, pass thru HTML, and hacks that is required to build a web page in Domino. Not very elegant. I believe it is one of the main factors why more Web sites are not running Domino as the backend considering the great security features of Domino. The new XPages features of Domino 8.5 really adds new capabilities to create Web 2.0 applications. However, if you currently have existing applications you will need to modify them significantly in some cases to make it work. In addition, your application must run on a Domino 8.5 server and you must have Designer 8.5. Since I have a T41 with only 1.25 Gbytes of memory, I was not going to run Designer 8.5. I tested it once and that was enough. Also, I needed users who do not have knowledge of Domino development ...

Last Friday was the second annual RIApalooza conference here in Chicago which I attended. It is run by a number of Chicago user groups including Adobe User Group and Flex User Group. They did a great job. Hats off to Correy Miller from Magenic for a great presentation on applying UX principles in developing applications. All the food was provided by Microsoft. There are now great tools out there to create Rich Internet Applications (RIA) including Adobe Flash and Flex and Microsoft Silverlight. Google now is starting to roll out their toolkit. However, one audience asked about IBM's contribution to providing development tools and support for Rich Internet Applications. The only mentioned was the Expeditor platform that most attendees have not hear of or disliked because of how big and bulky it is compared to Adobe's and Microsoft's solution. Unfortunately, the perception is that IBM does not seem to be involved in RIA at all. It then hit me, what is IBM's strat...

Since Notes is a client server solution it generates a significant amount of NRPC calls between the Notes client and the Domino server. Thousands of NRPCs are created during simple actions like searches and lookups. If you are developing Notes client applications that are used only inside your LAN you will never notice this because the NRPCs are quickly processed. However, if you are accessing the Domino server through the Web, the time to process the NRPCs grows exponentially as packet jumps from router to router. What took less then a second on your LAN could take minutes or longer. One way to reduce the delay cause by NRPCs is to process as much of your transactions using RunOnServer agents. For our applications, we package everything as XML and process the XML using RunOnServer agents and return the response as XML which is then process on the Notes client using string manipulation which is very fast. From the response XML, we then populate the form. Therefore, there is separ...

If you are interested in rich internet applications or want to learn more about User Interface design, the second annual RIApalooza is being held in Chicago on May 8, 2009. If you want more information, go to http://riapalooza.com. It is cheap, $20.00 for an all day event. If you are coming let me know. I will be there.

A big part of Notes 8 has been the ability to create and run composite applications. Regardless on how you create composite applications whether the IBM way or Richard's way, you need to really understand the audience that you are developing the application for before you venture into composite applications. Composite applications are great in tying different components together to create a visual relationship between data. For the Notes 8 client this can be done by displaying different components in different frames that are linked together. However, this is not always the best way of displaying the information. For example, netbooks are now very popular with a number of sales staff that we have been working with. The typical screen resolution of netbooks are 1024 x 576 much shorter that the typical laptop with 1024 x 768. Therefore, screen real estate is very precious. As the results, composite applications like the Lead Manager composite application example from IBM becom...

Over the past couple of months I have been optimizing our IBF 3.0 technology to develop applications. One of the goals of the project is to develop Notes applications with an interface design that is effective for users, especially small business users. The design team and myself have gone through a number of different designs understanding the limitations of the Lotus Notes Basic client. I thought about designing just for the Lotus Notes standard client, but I do not like it because it is big, slow, and the UI is buggy. As many who know me, I would have preferred that IBM revamped the Basic client rather than go with the an Eclipse framework. I understand why IBM went with the Eclipse framework, my I still do not like it. I am a proponent of small and lite clients. The Lotus Notes Basic client is much leaner and faster, but the UI and controlling it even with all the tricks that I and others like Chris Blatnick and Nathan Freeman has come up with is still lacking. This is espe...

Over the next few months I will be involved in a number of Notes application projects that will require design interfaces for our clients. I usually sketch out the interface using paper and pencil and then scan it in and store it in a file. I read Daniele Vistalli's blog about "Website designs for lazy developers." He mentioned in his blog about the tool Balsamiq Mockups. I downloaded and tested it out. It is great. It will save me a lot of time. With Balsamiq Mockups I can quickly create it and store it as a file and make changes to the UI design with the client on the fly. Thanks Daniele for the blog. It is also very cheap at $79.00. I just recommended this product to a few other designers that I work with.

We are currently working on a new interface for our IBF-based product line and our graphics team sent me this link that I would like to share with everyone. It is blog entry about using icons on your web site. However, it can easily be applied to creating interfaces for Notes client applications (both the standard and basic). http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/03/how-to-use-icons-to-support-content-in-web-design/

Over the past couple of days I have been trying to trace a bug in my code without any resolution, until today. Wasted days of precious time. I trace down the issue and discovered it was the result of another odd behavior of Lotus Notes. I do not know if this applies to other versions of Lotus Notes, but I can guess it does. In the Lotuscript database class, NotesDatabase, the property Notesdatabase.Server is used often. It should return the server name in the following format: CN=Acme01/O=Acme This is fine, but if you get the same property in a dialog box, you WILL NOT get the same format. Instead the format is: Acme01/Acme So when I was parsing the server name I would get different results causing a chain of errors that resulted in hours of time tracing the error in code that has been working for years. What a pain. As we push Notes and Domino more and more into a new level, we are finding more and more things to watch out for.

ReCor has just released two new training courses for Lotus Notes 8 in additional to our LearningDocs for Lotus Notes 8.01 - Standard / Migration course, we now have available for download: LearningDocs for Lotus Notes 8.01 - Advanced Course LearningDocs for Lotus Notes 8.01 - Basic Client The advanced course covers topics like Quickr integration with Lotus Notes and advanced rich text editing and remote users. The new Basic client course provides detailed training on the Classic or Basic client. This course took us longer because thought it seem that there was not much differences, there were many changes to the Basic client compared to Notes 6.5 or 7. From the interest that our customers has expressed, there is a lot of companies that will be rolling out the Basic client since their hardware and operating system will not support the Standard client. As I mentioned before that is a lot of new features in the Notes 8 Basic client that developer can utilizes. At the April GRANITE me...

Chris Blatnick talks in his blog about how important interface design is in making software a success. Recently I became aware of a major development project that broke many of the guidelines that we use to design interfaces. A major retailer started implementing a new POS software for their stores that was suppose to revolutionize their operation. You would think that they would work with store employees who will be using the POS systems to design the best solution, run test pilots to make sure that the software met the needs of the store employees, and have a detailed implementation and training plan. Answer NO NO NO. Software that are created by developers who live in a box and never get the customer (users) involved with most likely fail. Here are a few example of why getting users involved in the interface design is so important: Since the screen sizes of POS system usually are small you would think that they would be very concerned about font sizes, no. The designers decided ...

Unfortunately, I was not able to present my presentation, "SOA, Not Just for the Web" at the June GRANITE Lotus Notes Users Group meeting. Because of all the flooding and weather related problems the attendance was less than normal. And with additional emergencies that came up during the other presentations, it was decided that my presentation will be postponed to the next meeting in August. However after lunch, we had an interesting conversation about how IBM is marketing their products especially to the SMB. Things that came up included improving awareness through better education materials and giving away licenses of Notes and Domino similarity to how Microsoft uses giveaways to get people hooked on their products. I have talked about IBM's marketing to SMB in the past and its lack of coherently. With the Lotus Foundation Start product now shipping with Domino, one needs to ask how small businesses is viewing Domino and Lotus Foundations. Is Domino an application...

At Lotusphere 2008, there was discussions about XPages and how it would change how Notes applications are created. Since I was so busy with booth duty and other events I did not attend any of the sessions that involved XPages. However, Rob Burton from my group did attend a session that talked about XPages. Yesterday, he asked if I attended any of the sessions that talked about XPages and I said no. I did briefly hear someone talk about it, but did not pay attention. Surprising he said from what he has learned XPages does a similar thing we having been do for over a year in our Integrated Business Framework system by removing the data from the form. Similar to the concept of XPages, in the Integrated Business Framework design when you open a document you are really opening up a form that can collects data from many databases. The form is automatically populated based on a set of XML configuration data. During the save process the data is stored not as a single document, but the ...

This is part 2 of my creating composite application for classic Lotus Notes clients. In part 2, I will cover how a new event in Lotus Notes 8 can used to simplify the process of creating a composite application. You can download the demo code from the sidebar or download it from here. This new event is "onSelect" and is found in Notes View. This event works not only for regular views but also for embedded views and even embedded views within a dialog box. This event is triggered whenever a document is selected in a view. It hold true even when the view is display for the first time. As a Notes developer, I feel this one single event is more than enough reason to upgrade to at least the Lotus Notes 8 Basic client. It makes a number of UI issues simply go away. Just like in the previous Lotus Notes clients we need to create a launch document in our composite application that will be used to trigger the population of the frames in the composite application. However, rather than ...