This Week in Lotus

Episode 90 recorded on Friday 24th February 2012.  We meet with four IBMers about the latest XPages book, the XPages Portable Command Guide, to discuss the aims and content of the book, who should read it, which resources someone new to the technology should read and more. Oh and Darren takes questions from the audience. Dangerous!



Download links - MP3 | OGG

Hosts:  Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests: Martin Donnelly (LinkedIn | Twitter) is a software architect and team lead for the XPages runtime team in IBM Ireland and has worked on all four XPages releases from Notes/Domino 8.5 through 8.5.3. Martin lives in Cork with his wife, three daughters, and two greyhounds. He admits to playing soccer on a weekly basis (should have hung up his boots YEARS ago) and salmon angling during the summer when the opportunity presents itself.
Tony McGuckin (LinkedIn | Twitter) is a Senior Software Engineer on the IBM XPages development team working from the IBM Ireland Software Labs.  He is also co-author of the Mastering XPages and XPages Portable Command Guide books.  Currently he is focussing on XPages Mobile and Social tooling/controls for XPages futures. Maire Kehoe is a Staff Software Developer at the IBM Ireland Software Labs, where she has worked on the XPages technology for Lotus Notes and Domino since the 8.5 release. She is a co-author of the book XPages Portable Command Guide. Dan O'Connor (LinkedIn | Twitter | IBM) is the team lead for Domino Designer based out of Littleton, MA. He is a co-author of the book XPages Portable Command Guide. Dan has worked on Domino Designer since the 8.5.0, prior to that Dan worked on Lotus Component Designer and Rational Application Developer.

Topics:
The XPages Portable Command Guide

• (Amazon US Paperback | Amazon US Kindle | Amazon UK Paperback | Amazon UK Kindle)
• Follow on to the magnificent Mastering XPages
• How did Maire and Dan get involved?
• What does it cover?
• Do you get stopped in corridors?
• If one was new to XPages, would you still read ‘Mastering Xpages’ first?
• Who is it for?
• Available in what formats?
• Does it cover the extension library as well?
  • No, but new book coming from Paul Hannan, Tim Tripcony, Paul Withers et al in April

Meet the Authors video:

• How did this come about?
• Do you think it will help sales of the book?

Where are we with XPages?

• Has it now completely replaced ‘classic’ development techniques?
• Are we seeing some leading-edge apps written with it yet?
• What is IBM developing in XPages internally? Any great use cases you can share?
• How do you feel about the vitality around XPages now that it’s a toddler ;)

Andrew Pollack’s “Delving into XPages” post

• Lots of comments
• Is he right? Is documentation inside of the product lacking?

From the TweetBag:

• From Steve Pitcher, “What does the major lack of Quickr sesions at LS12 indicate?”
• From Keith Brooks, “If not yellow, which color will ICS be?”

Tips:
Darren:
Watch out when deploying Symantec Endpoint Protection with Notes preloader in 8.5.2 and later. It seems to be SEP 11.0.7 and higher but don’t take my word on that. Basically it crashes Notes at log on and the only fix (so far) is here. So far the issue seems random (not all PC’s are affected), but YMMV.
Martin:
Get on OpenNTF.org and try our latest stuff as a habit - whenever you can. Give us early feedback, and contribute where you can … it’s a great chance to influence XPages futures!
Tony:
Get the XPCG if you haven't already (+ MXPD !) ... XPCG... Six chapters... and pulling one... read Chapter 4 on the XSP client-side object.  Also.. not XPages but equally as mind-boggling!  The Quantum Universe: Everything that can happen does happen - by Prof.B.Cox / J.Foreshaw.
Maire:
Read the articles on the wiki, the Domino Application Development wiki on the internet. Specifically the XPages API docs, which happens to describe methods available from Server Side JavaScript.
Dan:
Check out StackOverFlow.com for answers to your XPages questions
Stuart:
Xero - financial accounts in the cloud
UC Expo - Collaboration Diner