Domino Interface

About a year ago, it was reported to me that all the kiosks that we help develop for the Take Flight exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) in 1995 were removed and replaced with newer kiosks. I was very sadden to hear this.  We developed three different types of kiosks, two outside the 727 and one inside the plane and installed into the back of each seat in the plane. My colleague, Robert Burton developed a compiler using C and assembly that was originally used for developing our Lotus cc:Mail training courses for version 1.0 all the way up to version 2.  The compiler and development kit allowed us to create very dynamic graphics for the DOS platform.  At least it was very dynamic in 1995.  Each of the 20 so kiosks ran on a Gateway 486 with 64M of memory.  Wow!!  Startup and shutdown of these kiosks was done by turning the power on and off.  I wonder what would happen to Windows if that happened. Since...

Sponsorship for MWLUG 2015 is now open.  We are very excited about this year's conference at the Ritz-Carlton-Downtown Atlanta, GA.  If you are a previous sponsor of MWLUG or have already contacted me about sponsoring this year, you will be receiving a sponsorship kit this week. If you are interested in sponsoring, please send me a note as soon as possible.  We have a limited number of slots for sponsorship. Fortunately, the ballroom is large enough this year that we are going back to our normal sponsor showcase format that we could not do last year. It is big enough to allow us to add another activity for this year. The MWLUG 2015 Committee is hard at work.  The web site development team including Mike McGarel and Sam Bridegroom is getting the new site ready to be launched in a few weeks. Lisa Duke our boots-on-the-ground has said that this is one of the most beautiful hotels in Atlanta. Abstract submission for MWLUG 2015 starts...

The MWLUG team is please to announce MWLUG 2015, August 19-21, 2015 in Atlanta, Georgia. Go to the link to learn more. http://www.mwlug.com

For the first time ever I was selected as an IBM Champion for 2015.  I honored to be selected.  I would like to thank everyone who nominated me and selected me.  I have been given this honor but it is the ICS community that should accept the honor.  Without our wonderful ICS community events like MWLUG can not happen.  When Gregg Eldred and I started the MWLUG conferences, neither of us thought  it would last this long.  But it has been the wonderful community that includes not only IBM Business Partners like myself, but IBM Customers, and IBMers that make everything possible. It is this community that motivates me to spend a significant amount time to help organize this event.  I have been involved with many different communities, but nothing compares with what I have experienced in the ICS community.  The passion and the willingness to help each other is unprecedented compare to any other technology community. As members of the ...

Here is another article in my "Fun with Dojo" series. Dojo traditionally has been considered slow.  One reason is that Dojo loads alot of modules before it instantiates the page.  Dojo with AMD helps reduce the number of modules when it first loads but not the number of modules.  This is great.  However, one thing that I really dislike are Dojo Dijit widgets.  They are heavy, slow, and require a lot of modules to be loaded. We like the Bootstrap widgets because they are lightweight. So instead of using Dijits that are built into XPages we created our own lightweight Dojo Bootstrap widgets that utilized the most minimal amount of required Dijit modules and dependencies. One of the things that we had to figured out was what bare bone modules that we needed beside dijit._Widget in order to create our own widgets and include them in the loading process.  When we were using Dojo 1.53, we created a custom loader with all the re...

We were testing iPhora Touch 2 with the attendees of MWLUG 2014 in the MWLUG portal and as usual, the interface had issues even after having outside users provide feedback before we rolled it out.  When you are so focused on the creation process it hard to see issues until it is seen by fresh pair of eyes.  So we are working on a new faster and improved interface for iPhora Touch. This is the evolution of any product. Since we are using a JavaScript/JSON Restful API approach most of the changes will be on the front end and only minor changes to the back end which is great.  In theory we can swap out different interfaces with little impact on the back end.  This is where the newer AMD approach for Dojo comes into play. The use of AMD in Dojo allows us to modularize the UI components even more than what we had.  Therefore, we have been upgrading all the iPhora widgets from Dojo 1.53 to Dojo 1.10.0 and at the same time upgrading from Bootstrap 2.32 to 3.2 an...

One of the "Next Big Things" these days is the use an MVC framework for developing Web applications. There are a number of MVC frameworks out there including Backbone, Ember, and the rapidly growing Angular.  Ideally these MVC frameworks are great, hook things together and any changes to the model (data) and all the views are updated based on the controller code. If there is changes to the model, the data is automatically updated on the server. This is the ideal case. However, it assumes one critical thing, you have the access rights to CRUD data on the server. This is an extremely dangerous assumption. In our iPhora security model, we assume the opposite and you do not have access rights to any data on the server. We do not trust anything and any request. We assume that you are trying to hack and inject. Your authorization is checked during each request. We looked at using Angular since it is the hot ...