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. Or this one. Happy coding!

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. Using script called getlibs makes it easier. Simply grab the script and run it like this: sudo getlibs -p libavahi-client3 libavahi-common3 libavahi-glib1 libbonoboui2-0 libcroco3 libdbus-1-3 libdbus-glib-1-2 libeel2-2 libgnome2-0 libgnomecanvas2-0 libgnome-keyring0 libgnome-menu2 libgnomeprint2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeui-0 libgnomevfs2-0 libgsf-1-114 libgsf-1-dev librsvg2-2 librsvg2-common libselinux1 libsepol1 libstartup-notification0 libxkbfile1 gtk2-engines-ubuntulooks gtk2-engines-murrine

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. It’s probably just the problem of showing the progress bar, I’ll look at it later.

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. Notebook is now blazingly fast. But - as stated above - has some problems. So it is time to buy new one.

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’. Navigator appears next to Data and Controls panels (you can put it somewhere else if you want) and it is the only place where you can actually close the database. Simply right-click on the database and select Close project. Or you can right-click on one database you want to left open and select Close unrelated projects and all other dbs are closed. It is recommended to save the Domino Designer perspective to retain Navigator view in it even after restart of Designer (Window -> Save perspective as… and leave the name as Domino Designer)

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’. And it didn’t make me happy, because once you have the opportunity to use even the old CVS in some project, it just feels like having only one hand if you can’t in another project. When IBM posted Source Control Enablement for Designer project on OpenNTF.org site, I was already kind of spoilt by Git. Of course I installed and tried Source Control Enablement project. But I just briefly tested to put NSF into SVN repository and then I did a svn checkout on a different computer. Cool! But what about Git? I quickly found out that EGit project for Eclipse is not working with Domino Designer and that was it.

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 3.0) and still stumble on a completely new things. XPages Data sources: another great presentation by Paul Calhoun. I especially liked his way of using “what’s in the box” instead of “let’s write the code” approach. The day before I was talking to Paul about what can go wrong during demos: my usual line if something goes wrong is “and as you can see, nothing happened”. And during this session he used his “this demo sucks”:-) Another session by Martin Donnely was about the Extension Library. He showed some parts of it and how to use them in xpages applications. I use Extension Library all the time, so nothing new to me, but I learned something about the background of it. How they are not “reinventing wheel” but just extending existing components to give them some extra functionality. Next session was a bit dissappointing: debugging and error handling in XPages by Vince Schuurman. Running the whole Notes Client from Eclipse to debug it sounds like something I do not want to do EVER, not talking about the fact, that it has nothing to do with XPages. But he did show, briefly, how to debug XPages, use custom error pages and so. So yes, there was some valuable information there. And another useful info: you can use MacBook Air, the new generation of course not the old one, to run Windows in virtual machine and it works just ok. That in fact did not help me with my decision what to buy as my next notebook, if Air or ThinkPad X201. Last session was Tim Tripcony’s Themes to the next level. And it was really fantastic, I did not know that themes can be used this way. You have to see the slides, believe me. Final part was about prizes (and one well done April fools joke). Theo did a fantastic job preparing this event. Everyone I had a chance to talk to was very happy with it. Agenda, food (coffee especially), hotel, everything! You can find slides from most of the sessions on Sessions & Speakers page od BLUG site. I’d like to thank people from Lotus Belgium who were so kind to let me charge my notebook on every break, because I forgot the power adapter at home. I am definitely coming to BLUG next year, in fact I am already looking forward to it!