The XPages development team has uploaded a new release of the Extension Library that contains new functionality as Phil describes below PLUS the document library template updated to XPages !

From Phil Riand:

<<
This release integrates major fixes, based on the comments/requests we got in the past month. Plus, it has all the fixes we needed for the Lotusphere live demos :-) Finally, it also includes an attempt to fix the IE8 dialog behavior. Please, let us know if you still see issues with IE8.

On the social side, we integrated some feedback we got at Lotusphere. As an example, look at the twitter sample page, and you'll see the options we added to cache the tweets for 60 secs without calling back the Twitter server (of course, the 60sec can be chenged, and the same behavior can be applied to the other services).

Thank you for the great feedback, and the positive strokes, we got at LS!
>>

Please note that the right release was only uploaded on 01/27/12 at 9:00 AM EST. The zip file in the same release document yesterday was a wrong one.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 7:53 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

I blogged some time ago about different types of XPages developers. One type of developers are Java developers who use the Eclipse IDE to build their own extension libraries which can be deployed as OSGi bundles globally to Domino servers. While this is not as easy as building apps and controls with Designer it provides more capabilities and allows easy usage in multiple databases.

These custom libraries use the XPages Extensibility API. I provided some time ago simple samples showing how to use this API.

Nathan Freeman brought this now to a new level. His project XSP Starter Kit has many more samples and more sophisticated samples.

Additionally Nathan shared some code that makes it really easy to set up an Eclipse IDE for XPages development: XPages SDK for Eclipse. With this project you don't need the Expeditor toolkit. There is also a wizard to create your own extension library plugin. Read more in his blog.

When you develop plugins in Eclipse you can directly debug them (often) without having to redeploy them. Check out the Debug Plugin and watch this video.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 3:07 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

During the session Bruce and Niklas demonstrated the following apps:

XSnippets - Serdar Basegmez, Frank van der Linden, Bruce Elgort, Niklas Heidloff
Social Enabler - XPages development team
JDBC - XPages development team
Mobile Address Book - Mark Hughes
Twitter Controls - Henning Schmidt
Mobile Contacts and Reminders - David Marko
Help - Paul Withers
Mobile To Dos - Mark Hughes
Mobile Admin - Ferhat Bulut
Mobile Navigator - Lars Buntrock
Lotus People - Mariusz Jakubowski
Event Signup - Michael McGarel
WatrCoolr - Tim Tripcony
XBlog - Keith Strickland
View PickList - Mark Hughes
Search and TagCloud - Frank van der Linden
Java Charts - Naveen Maurya
ZK Spreadsheet - Dennis Chen
ReCaptcha - Marco Dreher
Select Database - Lars Buntrock
Uni-Form Controls - Mariusz Jakubowski
PDF Exporter - Rami Muurimaki

Posted by Bruce Elgort At 6:19 PM Location Orlando, FL | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Social Business Online system used the poll control from Ferry Kranenburg. From the 'making' document:

<<The Poll Widget utilizes an XPages Poll Custom Control available on OpenNTF.org. This poll was submitted by F. Kranenburg and provided a great base for us to deploy a polling application. The custom control was further customized to store results into a Domino document.>>



The online system also used the XPages Social Enabler for the Twitter integration:



Ryan Baxter used in his Social Gadgets session the event signup app from Mike McGarel.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 5:43 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Kevin Cavanaugh talked this morning in the Lotusphere Opening General Session about OpenNTF's success and IBM's commitment to the XPages community.





Sorry for the poor quality of the pictures.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 8:55 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Please join us at the OpenNTF Birds-of-a-Feather session which will be held on Wednesday, January 18 at 5:45pm in the Swan Toucan 2 room. This has always been one of my favorite times at Lotusphere where many of the community application developers come to talk about their projects, OpenNTF and app dev. Please consider joining us for this 60 minutes of open source and community centered goodness. Will we see you there?

Posted by Bruce Elgort At 6:29 PM Location Orlando, FL | Permalink | Comments (0)

Please join IBM's Niklas Heidloff and myself at Lotusphere 2012 in the BP109 session entitled "Apps, Apps, and More Apps: Meet the Very Best Open Source Apps from OpenNTF - The 2012 Edition". The session will be held on Wednesday, January 18 from 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM in Swan 5 - 6. In this session we will demoing many of the great apps and controls from the community, highlight the two development contests that were held on much, much more. Will we see you there?

Posted by Bruce Elgort At 6:17 PM Location Orlando, FL | Permalink | Comments (0)

OpenNTF will be participating in the Lotusphere 2012 Product Showcase at pedestal number 516 and look forward to having you stop by! Members of the OpenNTF community will be hand to discuss all things OpenNTF. We have some really great OpenNTF stickers to give out as well.

Please also "Follow Us" on Twitter.

Posted by Bruce Elgort At 6:13 PM Location Orlando, FL | Permalink | Comments (0)

Phil Riand and team have contributed a new project to OpenNTF - JDBC Access for IBM Lotus Domino. Here is a description from Phil:

<<
We started a side project a couple of years ago to make Domino data pervasively available, and increase the intrinsic query capability of the platform. But, since it is a side project , its development slowed down because we focused on the XPages runtime, particularly the Extension Library. Now, with XPages supporting relational data access, with the increasing demand for social data analytics, I think it is time to share a first version. So here it is: JDBC connectivity for Domino!

This project provides a true SQL engine for Domino data, based on top of the popular SQLite engine, along with a JDBC driver. It allows SQL queries, including joins and unions on views coming from different NSFs, while maintaining the NSF strengths like security and data type flexibility. You can easily leverage it from an XPages application (see the demo application), but also from any third party applications supporting JDBC, like report editors, database explorers... And because SQLite is so popular, its SQL grammar is well known by code generator or report editors.

This is the first release out and we are definitely seeking feedback and help, particularly on the testing side. Specifically, we need a large, JUnit like, automated test suite which we are currently missing. Any volunteers would be welcome.
There is also a lot of areas for innovation, like custom SQL functions dealing with specific NSF features, access to documents items within the query, performance optimization with a better use of indexes... So feel free to chime in, the whole source code is bundled. You just have to speak Java and "C" :-)

Please, let us know what you think and enjoy this new exciting capability.
>>

I've created a teaser video showing the JDBC driver in action.

Here is a screenshot from a Birt report reading data from a NSF:



Here is a screenshot showing the data source in Birt:



Here is a screenshot showing a join from XPages:



Here is a screenshot showing the performance results of a query of a 5000 rows/view entries table/view where the SQL query is 3.5 times faster.

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 1:34 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Happy new year everyone.

The number of downloads has increased last year again. 182.693 releases were downloaded in 2011 which are 18% and 28.552 releases more than in 2010.

2008:        104.234
2009:        128.162
2010:        154.141
2011:        182.693

Posted by Niklas Heidloff At 4:13 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)