Domino Interface

I will be presenting a session at the LTAP 2010 virtual conference this week. My session is entitled "Introduction to Dojo for Domino Developers". It will introduce Domino developers who are not familiar with Dojo and how you can used it with Domino as a data store. I will provide a few demos including how you can create a Domino file uploader with Dojo that resolves many of the problems that have existed in the past. I will discuss this technique in my blog tomorrow.

If you are interested in going beyond just what XPages has to offer and understand how the guts of Dojo works a great site to visit is http://sitepen.com. Their blog is very good in covering the basic and advanced understandings of Dojo. Here is a great discussion on their site on how dijit widgets work. http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2010/07/12/dive-into-dijit/ They have also great tutorial on the basics of Dojo. http://www.sitepen.com/blog/series/dojo-quick-start-guide/

The integration of Dojo into my UX Pages Project has been moving steady along for the pass few months. The current version of Dojo in Domino 8.51 is 1.32 and has certain limitations that hopefully will be eliminated in Domino 8.52 with a version upgrade of Dojo. This has been a huge learning curve for me with many dead ends. I have added Dojo objects and Dijit form, field, comboBox, check button, radio button, spinner box, filteringSelect, and button widgets into the UX compiler engine. A Dijit widget control can now be represented by a simple UX xml tag. For example, for a simple field, when compiled will become: It will automatically add the dojo.require("dijit.form.TextBox") statement into the html and add links to the Dojo, Dijit, and Dojox javascript library. Domino data is now surfaced as Dojo objects using XML and JSON using Domino agents. Long terms wise, I would like to create a Dojo Domino data store object that can create JSON and XML data stores directly from...

Now that we have made our session selections for the MWLUG Conference 2010, we will be posting most of the session on the web site, www.mwlug.com, hopefully today. Unfortunately, my Domino Designer 8.51 totally crashed last night as I was setting up the session page. The Domino Designer 8.51 now needs a total rebuild.

If you are interested in learning more about creating Domino applications using Dojo, I will be presenting at the June 2010 GRANITE meeting on June 14, 2010 at the IBM Center in Chicago. I will cover what is Dojo and how it works. I will be demonstrating and using my UX Pages tool in creating Domino applications live. Dojo is the core to XPages. If I have time, I will talk about that. My colleague, Rob Burton will be provide a short technical demo ADODB for Domino. See everyone there.

Last year I was working on a new thing that I called the UX Pages and DLEX Engine. It was based on the XML declaration language used by Adobe Flex. UX Pages is similar to the approach now used by XPages but has a number of advantages. I did not have the time to devote to it last summer given all the work that had to be done for the Midwest Lotus User Group Conference plus my full-time job. So I never moved forward on developing the technology any further. However, this has changed. This year, NEOLUG is handling a big portion of the effort for MWLUG 2010 so I have more time. In addition, I needed it for building a number of customers applications. Therefore, I have a major incentive to develop it further especially since we are developing more and more Web applications and moving away from developing Notes client based applications. Does this mean that I will not develop using XPages. Not at all. I would like to have developed the Web applications using XPages, but the applicat...

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 ...