My thoughts on 2018

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We are now a few weeks into 2018. Back in the 1970’s and 1980’s when I grew up, if anyone talked about 2018 it was in a science fiction book or movie. Even the movie Back to The Future II took place in what’s now the past. But now we are here, so let’s talk about what I think we can expect for this year.

I see virtualization and containerization become even more wide spread. Not only will IBM develop the next generation of its Connections product using containers and microservices, but IBM Domino will support Docker containers as of the next feature pack.

The idea of packaging services in easy-to-deploy containers is an evaluation of traditional virtualization, and I think we will see this much more in the next year. A number of companies already use Docker as one of the components in their cloud offerings. Amazon, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft are just some of those companies, and I think we will see even more of Docker in 2018.

The Internet of Things (IoT) will continue to grow and develop, together with voice control of devices. The other day I visited the home improvement store Lowe’s and when I passed the thermostat section I noticed that several of them now integrates directly with Alexa. At home we have a number of IoT devices connected through a home automation hub. This morning when I woke up I just had to say “Alexa, turn on good morning”, and several different lights in different rooms throughout the house came on, at a preset strengths. I got into the shower, pressed a preset button on the control panel and the shower turned on my preferred showerhead at the temperature I have preprogrammed. The shower controller is a few years old, and it happens that I get irritated over the fact I can’t control it through Alexsa. That is how spoiled I have been from that convenience.

There are way for developers to create their own solutions for Alexa, as well as for other IoT devices. My SmartThings home automation hub uses Grovy as the language for apps running directly on the hub. I have also been experimenting some with the IoT functionality through IBM Cloud (formerly Bluemix). But you still need to be a developer to create applications for these solutions.

Amazon has however a low-code/no-code option in Alexa Skills Kit, and recently my wife built a custom Alexa skill. In the coming year I see low-code/no-code become more of a focus. Microsoft PowerApps, SalesForce App Cloud and Quickbase are just some. IBM is developing their LiveGrid, which looks very promising. If we look back a little over 20 years, we have Lotus Notes 3.0 and 4.0 as early examples of this concept. The term citizen developer is often used today for non-programmers developing business solutions outside the IT department.

For many years the IT department have been trying to prevent this, but I think we will see a return of users who quickly develop solutions for their own or their departments use, without involving IT. With services available in the cloud, the IT department don’t have to worry about the maintenance of servers, install and licensing of servers, etc. Instead they can focus on teaching the citizen developers best practices and how to secure their applications. IT will go from running the backend to supporting the users in their development. In addition they can develop more advanced solutions, beyond the skills of the end-users. I don’t see the IT departments going away, just shifting their focus somewhat.

 

 

10th Anniversary of My Blog!

Posted on by Posted in #IBMChampion, Blogging, Community, Personal, WordPress 3 Comments

Yesterday marked the 10 year anniversary of this blog, even though it had two different homes over that time.

I had tried blogging a couple of times earlier. In 1995 I went scuba diving in Egypt for a week, and I documented that on the personal web site I had created. This was done in a diary/blog format using an IBM Thinkpad 701 and pictures taken with a Kodak DC-40 digital camera. All HTML was coded by hand. Some years later I installed the blog templates for Lotus Domino to try it out, but I was never motivated to start blogging for real.

But in 2008 it was the right time. The IBM business partner Lotus911 (later GBS) had registered the domain BleedYellow.com and offered free blog hosting, using IBM Connections. I also felt more confident and wanted to share some code and knowledge as a way to pay back for all the help I had been getting.

I registered an account and started blogging right before Lotusphere 2008. I kept blogging at BleedYellow.com for a number of years, but in October 2012 I moved my blog to WordPress and my own domain. I was able to import all my existing blog entries to WordPress, so you can still view them even though GBS did shut down their US operations in 2015.

I started by blogging mostly about Notes and Domino, with some more personal articles. Eventually I expanded my blogging to cover other technologies, like web development using Javascript and jQuery, but still with an eye towards Domino developers.

Lately I have also started to share code related to NetSuite, a platform I have now been working with for a little over a year. I have been wanting to blog more about NetSuite, but been lacking the time. But don’t expect the content about Notes and Domino to go away. Version 10 is coming later this year, and I expect there will be plenty of new features to write about!

At times I have not been blogging as much as I wanted, due to work as well as some health issues I had in 2016. I apologize about that. I hope to be able to blog more frequently in the future. I have several subjects lined up, I just need the time to write.

Thank you for reading my blog and commenting on my articles. To know that I was able to help someone makes it worth to keep blogging.

2018 IBM Champion for ICS

Posted on by Posted in #IBMChampion, Community, IBM/Lotus 3 Comments

Together with a number of other people, I today received a mail from IBM telling me that I had been selected as one of the IBM Champion for ICS. This is the fifth year I have received this honor, and every year I am grateful to everyone who nominated me.

I also want to thank Libby Ingrassia, World Wide Manager of the Champion Program, and Alan Hamilton, Manager of the ICS Champion program. They are doing a great job supporting us Champions!

For those not familiar with the IBM Champion program, this is a program where IBM recognizes people who are NOT IBM employees for demonstrating both expertise in and extraordinary support and advocacy for IBM technology, communities, and solutions.

IBM Champions are enthusiasts and advocates: IT professionals, business leaders, developers, executives, educators, and influencers who support and mentor others to help them get the most out of IBM software, solutions, and services.

The IBM Champion program recognizes these innovative thought leaders in the technical community and rewards these contributions by amplifying their voice and increasing their sphere of influence.

Being an IBM Champion is a huge honor for me. I have been working with Notes and Domino since 1995, and when I was first selected as a Champion in 2014, it spurred me to contribute even more to the community. I have been presenting at several conferences over the last few years, and I think the confidence I gained from being selected made me submit presentations to those conferences.

So thank you IBM, not only for honoring me as a Champion but also for giving me the confidence to do new things in the community!

Celebrating 20 years in the US

Posted on by Posted in Life, Personal, Texas, United States Leave a comment

Many of my friends have a tradition of around New Years write a review of the year that just ended, either on their blogs or (more frequently these days) on Facebook. I have been doing that in the past as well. But this year is different for me.

Yesterday it was exactly 20 years ago I was standing at Arlanda Airport outside Stockholm, with a one-way ticket to the United States. My dad and sister were there with me, to say goodbye. I had spent the last few weeks packing anything important that I wanted to bring with me, and had sent it off with a shipping company a few days earlier.
I had also been working extra to make some additional money. I had to furnish a new place outside Boston, where I got a job as a Notes and Domino developer waiting for me at International Data Group.

But my flight would not take me to Boston. Instead I travelled to Spokane, WA. My then-wife Angie, who I had married just 3.5 months earlier, had returned to Idaho where she lived when we met. After I landed we spent a night at a hotel before we packed up her car with her belongings, including her cat Nicky. We then spent the next 4 days driving along I-90 across the northern USA, until we arrived in Boston, for a new chapter of my life.

Much have happened since that cold January morning when I left Sweden. I had a son in 2000, and a few months later my dad passed away back in Sweden. In 2002 we moved from Boston to Dallas, where Angie was from and where most of her family lived. A little over a year later Angie left me. Eventually I met my new wife Chrissy, and I cannot be more happy. My life is really good, I have a job I love, and a wonderful wife. I wonder what the next 20 years will bring me.

Finally, to all my family and friends, a Very Happy New Year!

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?

IBM Bluemix is now IBM Cloud

Posted on by Posted in #IBMChampion, Cloud, IBM/Lotus, Watson Leave a comment

IBM recently renamed IBM Bluemix, their PaaS (Platform as a Service) offering, to IBM Cloud. This new name makes more sense, and much better describes what it is. From a marketing view, this is a good change.

From a technical point, nothing changes. You still have a huge amount of different services and API:s to pout together in any way you like. At MWLUG 2017 in Washington, DC I demonstrated how to build a translation tool and a text-to-speech tool in a few minutes using IBM Cloud (back then still called Bluemix) and then use that functionality in your web applications or even in the IBM Notes client.

I was just scratching the surface on IBM Cloud, using Node-RED and IBM Watson to make this possible. If you haven’t signed up for a free IBM Cloud account, go ahead and do it. Spend a few hours looking around, and I am sure you will find several useful tools.

Why not use IBM Cloud to host your Mongo DB or SQL database? Or take advantage of the powerful Watson API? You can focus on developing your applications, instead of having to build the infrastructure yourself. I see this modular approach as a good way to build applications in the future.

 

ICON UK – Webinar about IBM’s Domino 10 and HCL partnership

Posted on by Posted in #IBMChampion, Community, IBM/Lotus, Notes/Domino, Sametime, Verse 1 Comment

On November 9 at 15.00 BST (16.00 CET, 10am EST), ICON UK will host a special edition of their “Around The Table” webinar series focusing on the recently announced strategic partnership between IBM and HCL. The partnership, which covers the Notes, Domino, Verse and Sametime product families, will deliver a multi-year roadmap for the products, and Notes/Domino 10 has already been announced for a 2018 release.

The webinar is free. You can read more about it at https://iconuk.org/iconuk.nsf/events.html, where you also can register.

Nominate your Champion(s)!

Posted on by Posted in #IBMChampion, Community, IBM/Lotus Leave a comment

It this time of the year again: nominations for IBM Champions!

Do you know someone in the community that deserves the title of IBM Champion? Someone who demonstrates both expertise and extraordinary support and advocacy for IBM products, solutions and communities. Perhaps someone who arranges user conferences, create videos to show different concepts, blog and share code. Or someone who speaks at conferences and thus promotes IBM products.

Nominate that  person. Or if you are that person, nominate yourself! You are the one that knows the best what you have done. Nominations are open for another week, until November 13, and the URL is https://developer.ibm.com/champions/nominate/.

Finally, here is a video where Libby Ingrassia, IBM Champion Program Manager, explains what the IBM Champion program is, who the Champions are and how to nominate.

Who wants to live forever? IBM Notes and Domino!

Posted on by Posted in #IBMChampion, App Modernization, IBM/Lotus, Notes/Domino, Sametime, Verse 1 Comment

We have heard people claiming for years that Notes and Domino is dead. Today IBM announced a move that hopefully should put those statements to a stop.

To Infinity And Beyond!IBM is partnering with HCL Technologies on the future development of IBM Notes and Domino, as well as SameTime, Verse, Traveler and the other associated products. The products will still belong to IBM, and they continue to manage the product strategy, marketing and licensing using the current offering management teams. The existing IBM development teams will be moving under HCL, where the actual development will happen.

From a customer standpoint nothing will change, except for an increase in investment and development. Support will still go through IBM, using the same PMS system as today. But it will allow IBM to get more developers and resources towards the development of new versions, using the finite budget they after all  have. It is a commitment to a sustained long-term roadmap and increased engineering ability.

The big news is that IBM is committing to releasing Notes and Domino 10 in 2018, and also announced that there is no end-of-live date for Domino. Not even an “at least until…” date like before. IBM are even discussing the next version after Domino 10.

What can we expect to see in Domino 10? Inhi Suh, General Manager for IBM Collaboration Solutions, said that application modernization is one of the big focus points. IBM will hold several “jams”, sessions where customers and business partners can give input on what they want to see in upcoming version. You can already register  for the first one, called Domino 2025.

Inhi says that not all functions will be in Domino 10, that is not even possible. But there is an increased commitment to the platform, and I expect that we will see many new and exiting features.

In addition, IBM will focus more on small and medium size businesses, not just large organizations. Domino is a great platform even for smaller organizations, so this is a welcome change in strategy.

So what do I think about this announcement? It is very exciting. Domino is a powerful and competent web application platform, and with some modernization, like support for HTTP2, support for Javascript everywhere (in the client as well as on the server), improvements to Lotusscript, and a modernization of the client user interface, the product could be truly amazing.

Anyone who knows their Notes and Domino history knows that the original product, Lotus Notes, was actually not developed by Lotus. It was Iris Associates who created it, under a contract with Lotus Software. many of the developers eventually went from Iris to Lotus, and then to IBM, as IBM took over Lotus. I truly hope that the amazing developers who have been working on the products for decades will be able to move over to HCL and their expertise will be utilized. In my mind that Is crucial for the future success of the products.

If you are a Domino user today, you should be very excited about this news! As more news are made available, I will post them here on my blog.

 

Creeper
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