Serdar Basegmez has developed a new version of his project xInvolve Custom Control. The new version contains several new functionality, most importantly personal favorites and anonymous ratings. You can try these functions in the XSnippets application.

Watch the mini video to see the controls in action.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 1:46 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ulrich Krause has created a new project SSJS Extension which contains new @Formulas that can be used by server side JavaScript code.

@URLEncodeExt
@URLDecodeExt
@CancelPartialRefreshExt
@GetNextBusinessDayExt

Watch the mini video to see the formulas in action.

Here is the documentation for @GetNextBusinessDayExt:

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 1:45 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

After a long time (3 months I guess) a new set of features has been implemented on OpenNTF XSnippets site.

In addition to a couple of bug fixes, we have implemented an extended search functionality, OpenSearch support and 'My Favorites' feature...

Search Improvements
We have added some usability enhancement to search. See the video.

First of all, if you click a letter or number key on the XSnippets site, search bar will be automatically activated now. This is probably better than clicking a thin search box. The second improvement is the type ahead in the search box. Each character you entered fires a FT search on the server side and will return possible matches in a type ahead format (thanks to Tim Tripcony). If you select anything here, you will skip the search results page and go to the snippet directly.

OpenSearch Support
OpenSearch is an open standard for cross-site searching. Today, many browsers are supporting OpenSearch feature.

OpenSearch has two basic functions. The first is to declare 'how to search in my site' meta information to other sites. The second is more exciting: You can also announce that 'You can search keywords in my site, use this url...'.

We have added a simple link to add XSnippet Search into your browser's search engines. To do this, search anything to go to results page and click the link on the top right corner.


On Chrome and Firefox, you can also define a specific keyword for this search engine. Using keyword you can search XSnippets site from the address bar.

For Chrome, keyword can be entered on the "Add Search Engine" dialog when you click the link. To use the keyword, go to the address bar, type your keyword and press 'tab'. For Firefox, you should edit the keyword in the "Edit Search Engines" dialog. After you defined the keyword, type your keyword, a space and search terms into the address bar.

Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer also support keyword search.


Chrome


Firefox


Internet Explorer


My Favorites
We have also added my favorite feature to XSnippets. In any snippet, you will see a large star on the top right corner.



You have to be logged in to mark a snippet as a favorite. You can also see other persons that marked the same entry as favorite.


Once you logged in, we are placing a cookie on your browser. So next time you visit the site, you can see your favorites even you are not authenticated.

You can see your favorites in the left menu and "My Favorites" page.



Finally, you may use "Best rated XSnippets" view to mark snippets  'in-view'.

I hope you like the recent enhancements. I will explain some technical details later in my blog. We will also release the final database in the project page soon. Enjoy :)

Posted by Serdar Basegmez At 1:20 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Until recently, the “In Catalog” field in the Project and Release pages normally displayed “No”. This has now been fixed – at least for the individual project releases. So now you can tell, on a release by release basis, if it has gone through the IP verification process, and has had its documentation and functionality checked.



The "In Catalog" field for projects is still bogus - and will eventually be removed - as the verification process is based on releases - not on projects.  

Companies that have processes that vet open source for internal use or for use within their products, should stick to OpenNTF code that is in the Catalog. Such code is more likely to meet their vetting requirements.  

A little background here. In 2009, we went through a process to bring some rigor to the OpenNTF. We wanted to provide a means where users could have some assurance that OpenNTF projects had been checked to ensure that the code was licensed in a manner that permitted them to use the code, did not have components with conflicting licenses, and was submitted by those who had authority to do so. But we didn't want to hobble the ability for contributors to post their submissions. So, after a couple of months of community discussions, we came up with an IP Policy with the following set of rules:

– All contributors have to be covered by a contribution agreement (based on the Apache contribution agreements).
– Contributions must be under either the Apache 2.0 software license, or one of the GPL3 family of licenses.  
– We would have 2 Catalogs, one for Apache-licensed projects, the other for GPL/LGPL/AGPL-licensed projects.  
– And of course the IP vetting process was established

We have moved slowly to enforce the policy – partly to ease the transition. First we established the Catalogs, and vetted many of the projects so that they could be placed into them. Second, the infrastructure was changed so that you could not post a release unless you were covered by a contribution agreement. And now we have made it easier to see if releases are in a Catalog.    

Over the next few months, more changes are coming to the OpenNTF project and release pages – including the ability to have private working areas for you and your team to work on a project. More on this in my next blog entry.  

Posted by Peter Tanner At 10:06 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

As part of the XPages Development Contest sponsored by IBM business partner We4IT, Stephan Schramm and Christian Annawald have contributed a new project ITWU Exporter on XPages.

The project comes with a set of APIs to export data from Notes databases to XLS, RTF, PDF and HTML. These APIs are Java APIs that can be invoked from SSJS in XPages.

The project uses various other open source projects for the core export functionality:



Watch the mini video to see the exporter in action.

Here is a screenshot of the JavaDoc:

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 2:42 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

As part of the XPages Development Contest sponsored by We4IT, Fredrik Norling has contributed an XPage Standby Dialog Custom Control. The control brings up a busy indicator when partial refreshs are done from an XPage.

It's the same code as previously submitted as XSnippet but the new project allows now importing the control via the new Designer import tool.

Here is a mini video and a screenshot:

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 1:59 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

In October last year IBM published the social enabler which allows access to IBM Connections. The social enabler uses a server side web security store (nsf) to store user names and passwords for basic authentication to provide a SSO between XPages apps and Connections. These credentials are used on server side to invoke the Connections REST APIs.

The IBM business partner Computer Architechs International Corp. built the Lotusphere online system this year which uses XPages and Connections. They looked for a way to provide a SSO without a server side credential store and they found an easy way using the ltpa token. They contributed this code to OpenNTF so that it can be added to the Extension Library.

The following text is from Reed Gesteland, President & CEO from Computer Architechs International Corp., where he describes more details.


"Computer Architechs International Corporation has been working with IBM since the year 2000 to build the online system for its premier IBM Lotus software conference called Lotusphere. The purpose of the online system, aptly named Lotusphere Online, is to provide a way for registered attendees to create their schedules, connect, interact and to get the chance to experience the latest that the Lotus Software portfolio had to offer in a real world user environment. Every year our team was challenged to do our best to seamlessly integrate the latest IBM Lotus software into Lotusphere Online which sometimes required us to introduce beta software into the mix for maximum impact. This meant that one year we needed to introduce the Lotus Notes 8 client with Composite Application technology prior to its GA release for use by attendees on the Lotusphere Online workstations available throughout the conference hotels. This also meant integrating the recently introduced Lotus Connections 1.3 as part of the Lotusphere Online offering to showcase IBM's latest foray into the world of Social Business applications. Every new Lotusphere meant new software releases and new challenges for our team to overcome. This last Lotusphere Online (renamed in 2012 to Social Business Online) was no different. Our goal this time was to seamlessly integrate XPages (IBM Lotus Domino 8.5.3) with the latest releases of other IBM Collaboration Solutions products including IBM Sametime 8.5.2 and IBM Connections 3.0.1 by providing a Dashboard type interface that harmoniously pulled together the different social business applications into one easy to navigate interface.

Our goal was to leverage the APIs of the various products to exchange data with the XPages dashboard to provide this seamless experience for every user. The dashboard would consist of widgets with the ability to provide two way population of data among the various products so that attendees could, not only see all important conference related information in one clean interface pulled in from various sources, but also send data updates to those same sources. For example, with Connections, we wanted to show users the most recent updates going on inside Connections such as the latest Status Updates, most recent postings in Communities, newest Bookmarks, etc.... At the same time we also wanted to give the attendee the ability to type in a Status Update on the dashboard which would then automatically populate that status update into the attendee's Connections profile.

Although the XPages Extension Library did provide a way for developers to store user credentials so that XPages could access other websites without requiring users to login each and every time (i.e. XPages accesses Connections via the API), we felt that storing a user's credentials as is on our site was a little cumbersome and not the most secure way of achieving our goal to have true Single Sign-on (SSO) among the various platforms behind the scenes.  So we tried to come up with a way to make this process more seamless and, for all intents and purposes, more secure.

After some extensive research, we found a posting in the IBM Connections Wiki about using the IBM Connections API in different programming languages. This posting described how to use the AbderaClient's addCredentials function to pass user credentials using Java. Using that function as a reference we created a new function that would "stuff" the token generated from the user's credentials into the LTPAToken cookie, the same cookie IBM uses to provide SSO among its suite of web applications. Once the LTPAToken got populated we were able to create the desired back-end SSO environment that we needed to pull off the integration with the desired results.

Some time after shutting Social Business Online down we were approached by IBM to contribute the LTPAToken SSO code to OpenNTF to be added as part of the XPages Extension Library for the benefit of other developers. We gladly agreed and hope that this code helps other developers with their integration projects moving forward."

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 1:18 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 2:05 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Matthias Schneider from IBM Germany has contributed a new project - E-POSTBRIEF Addin for IBM Lotus Notes. There is a short video on YouTube (German). Below is his description of the project:


In November 2011, IBM and Deutsche Post announced a comprehensive cooperation about the E-POSTBRIEF offering and its integration with IBM technologies and solutions.
Some of the details could be found here:
- Deutsche Post announcement
- IBM announcement (German)

As of today, the technical integration of Deutsche Post's E-POSTBRIEF offering into Lotus Notes is available at OpenNTF.org.

Users who want to send and receive E-POSTBRIEF documents could now directly access this feature from within their collaboration client if connected to the provider's E-POSTBRIEF gateway.
The E-POSTBRIEF add-in for Lotus Notes bases on the German mail template. It integrates seamlessly with the proven security features of both vendor's platforms. The desired functionality could be easily deployed via policy to any Notes client that leverages the enhanced design.

The new add-in will be delivered as an extension for current 8.5 editions of Lotus Notes, but back-porting is also possible.

IBM will also pitch E-POSTBRIEF as part of its consulting and integration projects to customers.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 1:41 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you are using Twitter and want to keep up with all of the great XSnippets being contributed, please follow @XSnippets on Twitter. Talking about XSnippets - have you heard about the new XSnippets contests OpenNTF recently announced?

Posted by Bruce Elgort At 5:47 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)