martin jinoch

I fell in love with Play framework. That is really cool piece of software and it is fun to work with. Recommended. We are currently using it in couple of projects and so far it saved us a fair amount of time. And new Eclipse (Indigo) has arrived to the Internets :-) Also Lotus Notes/Domino 8.5.2 FP3 is out with some annoyng bugs fixed. And it seems to be a bit faster.

Recently friend of mine asked me for help with an XPages application and one of the “problems” we had was validating user inputs. We needed to make sure that user enters something in one of the two fields. My first thought was “ok, it’s going to be a simple xp:validateExpression checking for non empty string and returning true”. But after giving it one more thought, I ended up with “just make one of the fields required, if the other one is empty”

As Git becomes available as a VCS for Domino Designer (thanks to Nathan T. Freeman for contributing EGit plugin compatible with it), I can start using the same workflow for developing/releasing/hotfixing as I use with Java and Drupal development. I’m pretty comfortable with gitflow way of doing these tasks, based on this branching model. And there is also git-flow-completion - a perfect companion for it. If you want to learn more about this approach, do not miss this screencast.

My new Thikpad X220 is up and running! Everything is now back at the state it was on my old notebook, except it now runs on 64bit system. Installing Lotus Notes Client on 64bit Linux distibution is kind of tricky. First because packages from IBM are for i586 architecture, you have to install them with --force-architecture switch for dpkg command. Then you have to install bunch of 32bit libraries to make Notes Clent work.

If you’re (like me) using Extension Library in all your XPages applications and therefore you need to install it on all servers your aplications run on, then Plugins Deployment for Domino project is what you’ll like a lot. Believe me. It has some problems, like not being multiplatform - importing updateSite works on Windows only. I tried it on Linux (no luck) a read that it has the same problem on MacOSX.

I bought it in December 2006! It still works fine except it is starting to make really too much noise sometimes, maximum amount of memory is 4GB, battery isn’t able to keep it going for more than 2 hours. And it is 15", with 9-cell battery that is “sticking out” on the back side of the notebook. It is quite heavy. I’ve replaced old hard drive with Intel SSD 160GB year ago.

I think I finally know why these new buzzwords have something to do with water. I’m starting to drown in all that information! And there is another ‘water related’ analogy: http://s-ak.buzzfed.com/static/imagebuzz/web04/2011/1/3/9/the-bermuda-tr…

If you are working in Domino Designer with a lot of databases at once or if those databases are on remote servers, it tooks forever to build even a single xpage. Eclipse is rebuilding (or at least checking for changes in) ALL opened databases (in Eclipse they are called projects). You can uncheck Build automatically in Project menu or use Navigator view to close unneeded dbs. Navigator is not by default part of the Domino Designer perpective, so go to Window - Show Eclipse View - Other and in category ‘General’ you can find ‘Navigator’.

I have recently moved all my notes templates to a Git repository. Well, not all of them, just those I currently have on my disk. And there are in fact several Git repositories they are now in. When IBM announced version of Notes Client based on Eclipse one of the first things I wondered was ‘will I be able to use version control system with Notes, at last?’. The answer was ‘No’.

Second day of BLUG 2011 was starting with two “blast” sessions: Admin and Xpages. I kind of wanted to see both of them, but finally I took the Admin one. And it was great and I am sure the Xpages one was great either. Fabulous @Formulas by Kathy Brown (Running Notes) made me think about how is it possible to work with some product for so long (I started with Notes 3.