Advanced XPages - advanced indeed
Fredrik Malmborg November 21 2011 11:24:26
Paul Calhoun and Russ Maher did a great job overheating my brain the first day of the event "Advanced XPages for Domino Developers" in Barcelon last week.It was my own fault because I was not prepared enough. Well the second day the parts started to fall in place and there was some wow moments. While I do not have much practical experience from it I cannot be sure, but it looks great. I guess there are some quirks I will learn how to handle when I start using it for production. I see a lot of possibilities so there will soon be XPages coding in production.
The gentlemen that guided us showed that the possibilities is almost infinite regarding web applications based on Domino with XPages.
For you that have not looked at XPages yet I would explain it like this:
Using drag and drop you create markup language with embedded JavaScript code that control both server and client side. For data you use your well known flexible nsf data store. No data migration needed. Styling is controlled by CSS and Themes.
This can and will be extended by third party libraries like dojo (v1.6.1 installed with Domino 8.5.3), JQuery, Google Charts, Extension Library from openntf to name some. Prepare to use Java as well if you want some real powerful applications, but it is not mandatory.
Of course you can use MySQL, DB2, SQL Server, Oracle or other as data store. Can be usefull if you have large amounts of simple data to handle.
If you can, use version 8.5.3 of Notes/Domino because it has some nice enhancements for the designer and administrator.
Paul showed us "Transformer" from the company he works for GBS. It transforms Notes applications to XPages applications (web 2.0). If you have many Notes applications that you need to web enable, then it will propably be stupid to not look into this service/tool. The demonstration Paul did looked like magic. And their tool let you use LotusScript to code your XPages !!!! Good or bad but it seams to work.
- Comments [1]
