Category Archives: Programming

#DominoForever – Release Day

Posted on by Posted in Administration, AppDev, IBM/Lotus, Lotusscript, node.js, Notes/Domino, Web Development 1 Comment

Finally it is here, the new version of IBM Domino. After the world premiere yesterday in Frankfurt, the world-wide launch is taking place today.

The focus in this release is on application development and administration. Features like self-healing of databases and increase of the maximum database size to 256 GB are among the most popular with administrators, while developers have a number of exciting additions.

The two most talked about features are the new Domino Query Language and node.js integration with Domino. Domino Query Language has been written from the bottom up to be fast, and the demonstrations I have seen confirms this. It is fast, very fast! And it can handle searches that would not only take a long time to create in earlier versions of Domino, but would take forever to run. Now the result comes back in a second, or even less. This really blew my mind when I first saw it earlier this year. John Curtis, the engineer that pretty much single handed wrote this code, did an amazing job, fully on par with when Damien Katz rewrote the formula language in ND6 and increased the performance several times over.

The second big feature of Domino 10 is the integration with node.js through the domino-db connector. It will be delivered in a separate application development pack, which will enter beta this week. This is a slight disappointment, I had been hoping this functionality would be available at the launch. But I rather wait the time that is needed for IBM and HCL to make it a fully stable product, instead of rushing something unfinished to the market.

Another product announced today was Notes for iPad, which makes it possible to run existing Notes applications unmodified on an iPad. All the functions we know and love are supported, like replication, offline access to applications, Lotusscript, Formula language, and more.

To support mobile Notes applications, there are enhancements in Lotusscript, for example camera and GPS support. Lotusscript has also been extended with other new classes, for HTTP requests and JSON parsing directly in native Lotusscript. No need to call Java or system API:s anymore!

HCL has done an amazing job in a short time, and Domino is on its way to become a very powerful and extendable platform for modern web development. A company can now not only deploy their existing business applications on iPads, they can also hire young developers who have experience of node.js and modern frameworks/libraries like Angular and React, and have them develop new solutions that can access existing data in Domino databases. Why use Mongo DB for data storage, when you have the much more secure Domino server available?

Domino 10 is not the end point. Domino 11 will be out next year, and IBM/HCL have committed to a long future for Domino. Forget #domino2025, now it is #DominoForever!

If you were not able to attend any of the launch events, here is the live stream from Frankfurt :

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=310707186390803&id=111720058922703

Domino 10 – Almost here!

Posted on by Posted in #Domino2025, #IBMChampion, App Modernization, IBM/Lotus, Notes/Domino Leave a comment

[ujicountdown id=”Countdown to Domino V10 ” expire=”2018/10/09 03:15″ hide=”false” url=”” subscr=”Countdown to Domino V10″ recurring=”” rectype=”second” repeats=””]

In just a few days, on October 9, IBM and HCL will unveil the new version of IBM Notes and Domino at an event in Frankfurt, Germany. The next day, October 10 (or 10/10, if you so like), there will be events in cities around the world. You can attend in person or watch a live stream. Find out all the details at https://www.ibm.com/collaboration/ibm-domino.

 

A New Badge

Posted on by Posted in #Domino2025, App Modernization, IBM/Lotus, Notes/Domino 1 Comment

A few years ago IBM started using Open Badges from Acclaim to indicate accomplishments, and as an IBM Champion I was awarded several over the years. Yesterday I received another one, I am now an IBM Domino 10 Sales Advisor V1.

This is how IBM describes it:

This badge earner has shown a detailed understanding of IBM Domino 10 and the #domino2025 roadmap and has successfully demonstrated, through taking an online exam, how customers can benefit from the advances in Domino 10.   They will have achieved a passing score of 75% or higher in the online exam.

There are rumors that IBM is considering to move away from traditional certifications and replace them with badges. This may not be a bad idea, if done right it will be much more granular, and your skills will be better defined. I expect more certification tests and badges to become available as we get near the launch of IBM Domino V10 in less than a month and a half.

Domino V10 – The Countdown Is On!

Posted on by Posted in #Domino2025, #IBMChampion, App Modernization, IBM/Lotus, node.js, Notes/Domino Leave a comment

The release date for Notes and Domino V10 has been announced. On October 9, at 10:00 CET, there will be a live unveiling of the brand new version during IBM Think in Frankfurt, Germany.

There will be a number of other release events around the world in the days following. For a deep-dive inte the new features I would highly recommend attending ICON UK. This year this conference is taking place in Birmingham, UK on September 13 and 14.

Learn more at https://www.ibm.com/collaboration/ibm-domino.

Six Days Left…

Posted on by Posted in #Domino2025, #IBMChampion, App Modernization, CollabSphere, Community, IBM/Lotus, Lotusscript, MWLUG, Notes/Domino, Uncategorized, Watson 1 Comment

I have finished the slides for my presentation at CollabSphere in Ann Arbor next week. I just have a little more code to add to demo database, and perhaps throw in a bonus or two…

My session will be next Wednesday (July 24) at 9am in Grande III.  There are still a few seats available for CollabSphere 2018. The cost is only $100 for 3 days of presentations, workshops, and networking, This is great value for the money!
Don’t miss the latest from IBM and HCL on Notes and Domino 10, Nomad and probably a surprise or two.

 

 

I’ve Seen Things You People Wouldn’t Believe…

Posted on by Posted in #Domino2025, #IBMChampion, AppDev, CollabSphere, IBM/Lotus, Lotusscript, MWLUG, node.js, Notes/Domino, Verse Leave a comment

This last week about 50 other specially invited people visited HCL America in Chelmsford, MA for a tour of their Collaboration Workflow Platforms (CWP) office. I was one of the lucky ones, and for two days we got to meet many of the engineers at HCL and see what they were working on around Notes and Domino. There are some parts that are under NDA, but I will talk about what I am allowed to mention.

We got to play with the latest build of Notes 10, compiled that same morning. It included some of the new Lotusscript classes we have heard about before, like the NotesHTTPRequest class and NoteJSONParser class. That functionality had just been added in right before our visit (it is not available in the private beta that was released a few weeks ago), but when I tested it (yes, we got to play with the code right there!) it worked perfectly.

This is a testament to the skills of the HCL developers. Most of them came over from IBM, and you probably know many by name. But there were also new-hires, and HCL is looking to fill many more positions in the US. The investments HCL is doing in this is impressive, and the whole atmosphere was extremely positive and filled with excitement.

We were split up into smaller groups and were treated to a number of very interactive presentations of the directions taken in different areas. The biggest focus was on application development, and with the addition of support for node.s to the platform and the new classes in Lotusscript, the engineers were visibly excited to be able to show off what they have accomplished.

The HCL developers have the right to be excited and proud. We were treated to two major announcements. The first one is a new extremely fast query language called DGQF (Domino General Query Facility). It is not an add-on, but part of the core code. It will be available in Notes/Domino 10, and can be called from everywhere, using Lotusscript, Java, Formula, and Javascript. Initially the searches can be made only in one database at a time, but in the future there will be support for multi-database searches.
At CollabSphere 2018 in just over a week, there will be presentations on DGQF. If you have’t registered yet, do it now. You don’t want to miss this!

The second announcement is under NDA for now, but I would expect for something exciting to be announced at CollabSphere, as well as at later conferences like ICON UK in September.

So stay updated by attending user group conferences during the fall, leading up to the release of Domino 10 at some day in some month, who may or may not contain a 10. I am very excited about the future of Notes and Domino!

 

Come see me at CollabSphere 2018!

Posted on by Posted in #Domino2025, #IBMChampion, App Modernization, CollabSphere, Community, IBM/Lotus, Lotusscript, Notes/Domino, Watson Leave a comment


I will be presenting my session Elementary – Consume Watson Services using Node-RED and Domino 10 at CollabSphere 2018, taking place in Ann Arbor, MI inn just a little over a month (July 23-23). If you haven’t registered yet, hurry up! This amazing conference that Richard Moy have been arranging for 10 years now will be full of news and sessions about Domino 10. If you are a developer, you should be very excited. There are a large number of session focusing on everything from classic Lotusscript and the new improvements coming in Domino 10 to sessions about Node.js and how it is supported in Domino 10. There are even introductions to Node.js and Node-RED, and how you can use them in your Domino environment as well as making yourself more marketable.

In addition to all the technical sessons you also have networking and social events. Don’t miss out on this great and inexpensive ($75) conference!

Will I see you at IBM Think?

Posted on by Posted in #Domino2025, #IBMChampion, App Modernization, Community, Connect, IBM/Lotus, Lotusphere, Notes/Domino, Watson Leave a comment

It is just over a month until IBM kicks off Think 2018 in Las Vegas. This conference takes place March 19-21 and merges several conferences, including IBM Connect (formerly known as Lotusphere).

After attending 19 Lotusphere/Connect conferences in Orlando (as well as one in Nice and one in San Francisco), I am ready for something new and exciting. IBM Think brings in many different parts of the IBM portfolio into one big conference, where we can learn about new and exciting technologies that we may not been exposed to before. I am looking forward to learning more about AI, security, blockchain, IoT and much more.

But I am of course also excited to learn about the upcoming Notes and Domino 10. IBM and HCL has promised too show actual working code at Think, and will present a timeline not only for what features we will see in the end of the year in Domino 10, but also in upcoming versions.

I have a feeling we will finally see functions and features people have been requesting for many years. A large part of the IBM:ers who worked on Notes and Domino moved over to HCL late last year, and I suspect they have been very busy. Here is an excerpt of a session description:

For those of you who want to integrate Domino applications into modern web applications and cloud platforms like Salesforce, etc., we will show you how. Domino is embracing JavaScript, Node.js and open source to become a full-stack web development platform anyone you hire off the street today can be productive in.

If anyone is interested in attending IBM Think I have a special promo code that will give you a $100 discount. Contact me at texasswede@gmail.com (use the subject “IBM Think Promo Code”) and I will mail you a code. You can also contact any other IBM Champion for a code.

See you in Las Vegas in a month!

 

Convert US state abbreviations in Javascript

Posted on by Posted in #IBMChampion, Javascript, NetSuite, Programming Leave a comment

I was working on a NetSuite project today, and I ran into a problem. I used DataTables to display sales orders. The data is retrieved through an Ajax call to a RESTlet on the server.

One of the columns to display is the state of the shipping address. The table had a number of columns, so I was happy that the state coming over during the early testing were the abbreviated state. But today I noticed that after real data had been entered into the system, the state was the full name. And I had no space left in the table for that.

So I did a quick search and found a snippet of code that converted between abbreviation and full name and vice versa. I made some minor modifications to the code, mainly to clean it up and also make the code easier to read. I introduced two constants to indicate which kind of conversion to use, and replaced the traditional loop through the array with a for…of iteration.

You can find the code here: https://github.com/TexasSwede/stateAbbreviations

And this is how you use it:

var stateName = convertRegion("TX",TO_NAME);                       // Returns 'Texas"
var stateAbbreviation = convertRegion("Florida",TO_ABBREVIATED):   // Returns "FL"

This code is of course not specific to NetSuite, it is plain Javascript. You can use it in a Domino web application or even in a Notes form. And naturally you can use it in pretty much any web application where you can use Javascript.

Enjoy!

Domino 10 and Beyond – my thoughts

Posted on by Posted in #Domino2025, #IBMChampion, App Modernization, IBM/Lotus, Javascript, Lotusscript, Notes/Domino, Watson, Web Development 5 Comments

It has now been a little over a month since IBM announced the new direction of IBM Notes, Domino, Verse and Sametime. I have been thinking through what I think this means for the product and the ecosystem of third-party tools and business partners. Some people view the move of development from IBM to HCL Technologies as an abandonment of the product family. But that is not how I see it.

IBM has, despite their size, limited resources to dedicate to development of the Domino family of products. They have new products and services they are trying to bring to market, and by having HCL take over the development and add more resources, this is a win both for IBM and for Notes/Domino.

With more developers dedicated to the product, I expect to see more frequent updates and new features added quicker than we have been used to the last 5-6 years. The product management and future direction of the platform is still managed by IBM, but with more non-IBM resources at their hands I hope the product managers will be able to push harder for the addition of new technology and updates, bringing Domino back to a first class development platform.

Domino was an outstanding product, but for the last 6-8 years the innovation mostly stopped. New technologies were not added at the pace they were adapted by the rest of the world, and the support for new protocols like TLS 1.2 was lagging. IBM also but on Dojo as the framework for XPages, while the rest of the world mostly went to jQuery.

But if IBM allows HCL to update some aging parts and add new functions, requested by the community, I can see this being a great platform. And IBM says they will listen to the community and the users. Starting this month, IBM is bringing the Domino 2025 Jam to four cities in North America: Toronto on 12/8, Dublin (Ohio) on 12/13, Chicago on 12/14 and Dallas on 12/15. here will also be several events in Europe as well as a virtual Jam sometime in the future.

At the Domino 2025 Jam developers and users will be able to suggest what features they find important, what needs to be fixed, and where they want to see the product go in the future. I don’t think the Jam will have a huge impact on the upcoming Domino 10 release next year, but it may help IBM prioritize where to put their effort. Where I see the Domino 2025 Jam being helpful is in the longer timeframe, especially if it is repeated every 12 to 18 months to verify that the product direction is still what the market is looking for.

I also would like to see IBM addressing at least the most requested changes on IdeaJam.

Let me describe some of the functions and features I want to see in an upcoming version of IBM Domino.

Javascript Everywhere

For the last 20+ years we have mainly been using Lotusscript, both in the client and for agents on the server. It is a powerful language, but if you have been working with other more modern languages (Lotusscript is based on Visual Basic) there are many limitations and functions you are missing.

I would like to see Javascript made into a fully supported language everywhere. Both in the client and on the server. Add support for jQuery, to make it easy to address elements, and create a Javascript API to complement the Lotusscript functions.

In addition to making it easier to create and parse JSON (used in and by most web applications today), it would open up the product to new developers who may come from a more traditional web development background.

I would love to see Lotusscript get a modernization, but I doubt that will happen. In order to improve Lotusscript, a quite lot of changes are needed. Instead I think the future improvements should be on the Javascript API side.

External API

Any modern product needs a public API so other tools and applications can integrate with it. I would like to see support in Domino for LoopBack, like IBM is doing in LiveGrid. When you create a view, there would be a matching API created to create, read, update and delete documents, as well as list all records, perform searches, etc.

But there should also be additional more specialized API:s available, perhaps the most common functions should be exposed as API calls out of the box.

Integration with External Services

Notes and Domino also needs integration with external services, e.g IBM Watson, Mongo DB or Node-RED. Why not support for IFFTT? Expose the calendar as a Google Calendar feed. But also make it easy to connect external services to Notes and Domino. Make it easy to use Oauth 2.0 to login to a Domino-hosted service and vice versa.

New Domino Designer

Unlink Domino Designer from the Notes client. Create a Eclipse plug-in (and make sure it stays updated to work with new versions of Eclipse). This will help new developers to start working with Domino, using tools they are already familiar with. The goal should be that someone familiar with Javascript should be able to open Eclipse and start writing code for Domino, and the only thing they need to learn is the Domino Object Model.

Add ready-to-use web components/plugins, so the developer can easily add for example a name-lookup into Domino Directory or a date/time selector. Support CSS frameworks like Bootstrap, and make it easy to modify the look of the applications.

Notes Client

The Notes client makes it easy to quickly build applications. You get a lot of the core functionality of the applications “for free”, like views, forms, etc. But you are also limited in how the application looks. You can change the look of views somewhat by selecting background colors, fonts and a few other attributes. On forms you can select between two different looks for some of the fields, while other fields can not be modified at all. What I would like to see is a way to easily restyle everything by using CSS. Then you can make the forms and views look much more modern. Let the developer create “themes”, a set of CSS rules and perhaps images that can be applied to new applications in seconds. These themes could be published online, for other developers to use.

These are just some of the ideas I have for improvements to Domino. What are you ideas?