Gurupalooza was followed by “Ask the Product Managers” which started with Ed announcing his move away from the IBM Notes product and into IBM’s mobile enterprise team (read more in Ed’s post, My new role: Moving to IBM Mobile Enterprise marketing). Ah, the end of an era. I well recall Ed starting up his blog a decade ago (initially hosted in Movable Type by that good mother vowe), and I wish Ed the very best in his new role. Ed also introduced Scott Souder who looks after Notes, iNotes and Connections Mail. Count the likes of Pete Jantzen and Dan O’Connor too, and I think the Notes / Designer world is in good hands.

A spot of lunch in the sun was just what the doctor ordered (not those flaming pretzel cookies though), before nipping off to attend the final Q&A session, “Ask The Developers.” All three of these panels were well-compered and full of good humour, with some excellent questions.

Byeeeee

I thoroughly enjoyed the closing session with the excellent John Hodgman and Steven Strogatz. I was especially delighted to see our very own Mr. Robichaux acquit himself so admirably on the big screen when discussing the proof for how 1 actually equals 0.9…. After the traditional blogger photo on stage (complete with reclining Hodgman!) it was time for the bit we all hate: a whirlwind of hugs and goodbyes, followed by (in this case) ten minutes of frantic packing and a mad dash through the Dolphin Rotunda (not for the first time) to catch a cab to the airport with Julian “Math Whizz” Robichaux.

All done then, for another year. It went too fast.

Highlights (people!)

There were sad and sombre times, but there was also jolliness scaled the very heights of joyful. Particular highlights:

• The Nerd Girls’ Spark Ideas session
• The Nerd Girls’ The Great Geek Challenge: a great job by Gab, Tim, Carl, Paul, Abigail and co.!
• Seeing folks like Joe, Rob McD and jonvon who came to Orlando to catch up with everyone: you chaps are the best :-)
• Friday night was an unexpected riot and set the tone for the rest of the week
• Chats, hugs and coffee (thank you Mrs. Elsmore!) in the rotunda
• When a seagull shat on the Wookiee
• Swigging superb homebrews and apple pie vodka around the pool courtesy of Devin, Ray and Karl-Henry…
• … then ending up in the hot tubs after said brews
• Seeing so many old and new friends
• Late night (and early morning) chats
• Hugs from Mat Newman!
• Flying out with Matt, Tim and Mark. Especially when the Wookiee got his IBM keyboard out and plugged it in to his Nexus 7. The stewardesses thought our little quarter of the plane rather hilarious

Uh, so… technology?

Oh yeah. Several people reported an upsurge in XPages-related activity, and I can well believe it. Having largely watched from the sidelines whilst doing other stuff (mobile web, Java and PHP), I now find myself getting involved in a reasonable amount of “modern” Domino development. Less forms, views and agents, more XPages and server-side Javascript and Java. The conference also exposed me to something I had hitherto ignored—DOTS—which I am most keen to get to grips with (assuming IBM see fit to include it in the server, scheduled hooks and all).

Beyond IBM, as I mentioned in my first post, I ended up buying a Nexus 7 at the airport, and used it a lot during the conference—definitely recommended. It beats out the iPad mini for me in a few areas: it’s slightly narrower, has a few more dots per inch to the screen, and is somewhat cheaper. Besides, my phone takes care of iOS things; as a technologist it’s good to have an Android device too (that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it).

As an aside, the Wookiee used his Nexus most successfully to write and publish blog posts—if you want to know more about how he does that from pretty much any device that can use a text editor and Dropbox, you should read the following posts forthwith:

1. Migrating to Markdown Pt1-The Rant!
2. Migrating to Markdown Pt2 Nuts and Bolts
3. Migrating to Markdown Pt3 From Domino To Markdown

Wonderful. Can’t wait to catch up with everyone again. Which brings me to my last point: if you feel the same, and are in London next week, come and join a load of us at some informal #LotusBeers in The Counting House from 6pm on Thursday (the 21st).

First up, a load of work, and chat in the rotunda. Always good!

And then, just before lunch we had a gem of a session: Spark Ideas, put together by the Nerdgirls. It was just wonderful. I nearly ended up blubbing like a baby (thanks Graham :-)) and also laughed like a drain. Nothing technical, nothing about IBM. Just a group of people I respect (more than ever) laying a little of themselves bare—and all power to them. Francie was a compere beyond compare (do you see what I did there?) and everyone who spoke was deserving of a massive round of applause. So thank you Susan, Carl, Gab, Tim C, Graham, Jenn, Andy, Kathy and Tim D.

Come the afternoon I cracked on with some more work (so diligent), thus missing out on a number of good sessions, boo! That said, I managed to attend a presentation chock-full of Domino Designer tips courtesy of senior members of the Designer team Kathy Howard and Dan O’Connor. This was a good ’un, some handy nuggets of info and a few Eclipse tweaks I had hitherto missed.

As the day drifted into evening, things really got going. The Penumbra Group put on their mighty Milkshake reception, which was made especially delicious (and not at all fattening) with some new custom milkshake flavours: whiskey and bacon being one of them if you please. It tasted amazing, although for the most part I stuck to a rather splendid boozy coffee concoction. The Wookiee managed to put away his own body weight in fruity vodka shakes, and as a result felt somewhat peculiar all evening (not that we noticed).

Tuesday night got even better with participation in another Nerd Girls event, The Great Greek Challenge which was just so much fun. Kudos to all the organisers, question-setters, and question masters! Team LDC managed to scrape prizes in a couple of rounds (despite a dire performance in the music round from yours truly)—in fact, we acquitted ourselves more admirably than we ever could have hoped. LDC were also very proud to be sponsoring this event alongside many other splendid organisations in the IBM world (check out the GGC site for a full list of sponsors).

But Tuesday was not done! Not by a long chalk! Many repaired to Kimonos (of course) along with half of the conference, but the evening topped-out for many of us with some wonderful homebrew (courtesy of Devin Olson, excellent apple pie vodka (thank you Karl-Henry Martinsson!), and of course fab company, all round the Swan-Dolphin pools (and later hot tubs. Class will out).

And so to Wednesday. This was by far the most session-mungous day undertaken. I attended excellent talks from Bruce Elgort and Serdar Başeğmez (“Meet the Java Application Server you already own…”), Matt White and Warren Elsmore (“Deploying & Managing Your XPages Applications”), and Craig Schumann (“Take a REST & Put Your Data To Work With APIs”). One other notable presentation was from Tony McGuckin and Martin Donnelly, all about XPage patterns. Very useful info, and helped validate my own approach to a lot of work recently, but sometimes a tricky presentation to follow—these gentlemen are very quietly-spoken!

Last, but by no means least, we flew the LDC flag and came along to the Wookiee’s presentation. The poor sod was placed in the last slot of the day (5.15pm) and was up against Paul and Bill’s “Worst Practices” session. How unfair was that?? Anyway, the loon acquitted himself well, talking about alternative languages on the IBM JVM, principally Scala. Bravo Wookiee! Have an arm to gnaw on…

We opted to skip the park in the evening and instead dined with good chums. After the meal, can you guess where we went?

And so to Sunday. I suppose one would class this as the first “proper” day of IBM Connect as Jumpstart sessions get going, and there’s business development stuff going on. In the Woodward / Myers / Poole suite pit things were somewhat muted and slow to start. We all had things to do, so the day was spent gently faffing. Mark and I even got a decent brunch in (one of the few proper meals enjoyed during the week).

Predictably, the evening started early at the pool-side reception, and finished late (by “late”, I mean around half an hour before the opening general session began. Oof!)

During the course of the evening, we found out that distant good people and closer good friends were going through hell after an appalling tragedy earlier. There is really not a lot one can do or say in such situations, but I hope the quiet chats and big hugs helped a little as the week passed.

…so to Monday, and IBM Connect “proper”! The general impression was that this year’s Opening General Session (OGS) was pretty good (certainly compared with the last couple of years). A few whacky ads-in-disguise and some rambling nonsense, but also some great content and… They Might Be Giants!

As for sessions, I particularly enjoyed Mikkel Flindt Heisterberg and Ryan Baxter talking about APIs and API design: a good summary of the issues involved with some excellent tips (I think these sessions, which don’t focus on a single platform or product, are extremely worthwhile). I also attended Teamstudio’s overview of their Unplugged product which was very informative (well worth a look—not least because our very own Matt White has done so much good work on this suite).

Monday evening got going with Speed-Geeking in the product showcase, followed by—what else?—UK Night! Once again we at LDC sponsored along with many other worthy firms, and everyone filled Shula’s bar with noise and laughter.

And what a trip! As long-time readers will know (!) I don’t do the Lotusphere thing very often. I went courtesy of my old employer in 2006 and then thanks to team Elguji got to go again in 2010 as the indy coder I am now. Despite this paucity in my attendance record, Lotusphere always feels welcoming, it just feels “right”—and every time I leave, like everyone else I get the post-conference blues.

I decided to attend Connect 13 on a whim towards the end of last year. I think it came about because I went out for beers with Matt and the Wookiee, and their excited LS chat convinced me.

In other words, it’s all their fault.

Anyway, on to the conference. We flew out on the Friday before, in a surprisingly empty Virgin plane, which was just tickety-boo. The stewardesses were most amused by the ridiculous set-up witnessed in row 64: the Wookiee and I were in full geek flow, with Nexus 7s (I bought a new one on the way out—recommended!), laptops and various charging leads all over the shop.

Once landed, a car hired by Mr. White saw us all to the Dolphin for a swift check-in, and beers (of course). We opted to try and plough through the night in a bid to kill any jet-lag once and for all. This was achieved in memorable style with help from our colleague Mr. Woodward together with Mr. Alan Dalziel and Mrs. Abigail Roberts (never give me another Jägerbomb).

Saturday started gloriously, and we were on a mission: to purchase the remaining contents of our London Developer Co-op give-away this year. Controversially, we decided to move away from our t-shirts, and come up with something else. The Wookiee is a genius at this sort of thing, so everything was meticulously planned, and the “LDC Conference Survival Kit” was duly born—cue a morning pootling around various stores, followed by an afternoon of vigorous assembly:

These babies proved to be most popular as the week progressed; we have a tough job for future give-aways now.

The remainder of Saturday was passed in time-honoured tradtion at the Big River and in ESPN (the Dolphin bar also featured quite heavily as I recall). Of course, the highlight of Saturday was (re)acquainting myself with many many folk, some not seen in three years—including finally meeting the man himself, Mr. Mat Newman! (who was more than ready with a bear-hug of course, none of this shaking hands nonsense).

And so dear reader, I bring post #1 to a close, and shortly move to post #2…

/0/83175A727DC5124200257A9A0025A7EE?EditDocument

of course, these have changed somewhat in vanilla XPages apps, and look something like this:

/page.xsp?action=openDocument&documentId=83175A727DC5124200257A9A0025A7EE

As you are no doubt aware, you can still the use the “original” URL style if you’re XPageifying (technical term) an existing app. For example, my app contains views which generate the old-style URLs, yet its documents now open in spiffy new XPages rather than using their old web forms. This is achieved by making use of a form property which has documents using the relevant form open in a specified Xpage instead.

This is all well and good until it comes to using the in-built CKEditor to render rich text fields—specifically when dealing with image uploads (possibly files too, haven’t tried them). To reproduce the bug, open a document within an XPage with the CKEditor using the old Domino URL format. Then insert an image and save. This will work just fine when creating documents for the first time, but try editing said documents (again, via the old URL format—that’s important!) and inserting more images. The CKEditor image upload controls throw a hissy fit, resulting in server errors similar to this:

HTTP Web Server: Unknown Command Exception
[/SomeNSF.nsf/0/SomeUNID?$$axtarget=view:_id1:inputRichText1&$$viewid=
!dap2navke5!&command=QuickUpload&type=Images&CKEditor=
view%3A_id1%3AinputRichText1&CKEditorFuncNum=0]

Ugly innit? The tell-tale sign here is the lack of querystring in the generated URL, hence the error. If you edit the same document via the xsp URL route, no problems at all.

I would contend that this is a bug given that Domino URLs are a supported feature of the server, but have no idea where it sits in terms of priority—or indeed whether IBM know about it at all, so be warned!

(My thanks to Matt for his invaluable assistance earlier today).

Now, let’s get some perspective back and talk about something else shall we?

The easiest way to get going is to ensure you have VBScript syntax support installed in Sublime Text 2. Navigate to “Syntax” under the “View” menu and see what gets listed. If you don’t have the VBScript stuff, there are a few ways to update your package support, but I would just use Sublime Package Control to install it (a lovely add-in to the editor which lets you do all sorts of stuff).

Once you’ve done that, do this (these instructions are for OS X, but should be similar on Windows and Linux):

1. Open the command palette (command-shift P on the Mac)
2. Start typing "install" in the dropdown. It should auto-complete to “Package Control: Install Package”
3. Once in package control type "vb" to find the VBScript Syntax Highlighting package
4. Restart the editor
5. Open an LSS file
6. Go to View » Syntax » Open all with current extension as…
7. Choose “VBScript”
8. Observe how your LSS file gets all colourfied innit

Not perfect, but it will do—job done.

The new social media tools are going to have as much of an impact as Notes did in its day, according to Laube. The problem, he said, is that they aren’t oriented toward accomplishing particular tasks, other than staying in touch with your friends and colleagues. “It is easy to miss particular things in your news feed in Facebook, but in a business context that isn’t okay at all,” he said.

Give the article a read, and more importantly listen to the accompanying podcast: Laube raises some good points (he even mentions the dreaded performance review!)

ReadWrite Enterprise: How Lotus Notes Changed the Collaboration Landscape.

The dutiful developer performs a “compile all” in their database, and is shocked to see a whole load of Lotusscript Error - Syntax Error reports in the compiler window. Whilst the compiler is probably pointing to a load of forms in one’s app (yeah, that’s helpful), the issue is actually with the shared action design element. You know, that bastard anomaly of a design note in Designer, whereby things that look like multiple design elements (shared action buttons)… aren’t (I hates it so I does, hates the shared actions element. Can you tell?)

I encountered this very issue earlier this week in a Notes client application I was performing some maintenance on, and it took me a while to track down. The offending action scripts were referencing some files that must have been stored on the previous developer’s machine, and Designer was not happy at all. As I found to my cost, Option Declare will not fix this issue. Nor will editing and re-saving the offending elements. One has no choice but to go through the code, find the errors and resolve them. The compiler gives little, if any, assistance at this stage.

My solution—which to my mind makes for far better coding practice anyway—is to rip out all the Lotusscript from such shared actions, and stick these routines in a separate library. You then reference these routines from the shared action buttons, and we never talk of this again. Moving the code solves a few things in one fell swoop:

1. Shared actions are all stored in one note in the NSF. If this note corrupts (and they do), you lose all that code
2. Storing all significant Lotusscript in one part of the application design (i.e. in script libraries) makes far more sense from a maintenance point of view
3. When editing Lotusscript in a script library, the compiler behaves itself and tells you about any problems. In shared actions, you’ll be lucky

So what do you know. 2011, and I’m still doing the odd Lotusscript tip… ;-)

Some of us have been clamouring for Domino Designer back on the Mac since it was pulled in release five. The Mac OS landscape (and mindshare of course) has changed dramatically since the R5 days, and then IBM came along and added fuel to the fire by using Eclipse as the base for new versions of Designer.

Fire? How so? I hear you ask… Well, inadvertently or not, in using Eclipse for your IDE you’re screaming that your environment will work on more than a Windows box. In the heady days of dreamy possibility represented by Hannover, one of the vaunted plus points for using Eclipse was its expandability, but also the fact that Eclipse is cross-platform.

Sooner or later, if Notes apps are to continue, the aged Windows-based C code underlying the standard Notes client has to be re-written, and then DDE has the wherewithal to become a true cross-platform Eclipse-based IDE of some heft.

But that won’t happen. Why? XPages. Drop the Notes cruft, go with the JSF-based XPages platform. If you have that, and only that, for your Domino apps, you stand a fighting chance of getting a cross-platform IDE^*. Until then, you’re pissing in the wind.

Let me be clear: I don’t mean this as a criticism (which may surprise some readers given my long-standing fondness for Macs). IBM have to pick their battles, and funds have to be apportioned: they’re not going to spend $$$ making layout regions work in Designer on Ubuntu.

^* that said, I still wouldn’t hold your breath if I were you. The Rational / Websphere tooling doesn’t have all this cruft, and that doesn’t work on OS X either.