Month: September 2014

Opening an XPage in XPiNC and passing Query_String parameters

Marky Roden XPages, XPiNC

I was very pleasantly surprised to find this works – coincidentally – twice this week someone has asked this question – can I open an XPage in XPiNC directly? I thought the answer was no……and not for the first (and/or last) time I was wrong.

The answer lies here – http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/ddwiki.nsf/dx/Domino_Designer_URLs_for_XPages

To prove it I created a plain XPage and added the firebugLite custom control

The following XPiNC URL

notes://copper/882579C70057C4C2/aLaunch.xsp?OpenXPage&marky=me

Pasted that URL into a browser and that successfully opened the XPage in question. I was able to show the location.href and therefore the Query_String passed in like this:

a1

 

Sweet !!

 

Closing soon: IBM Domino/Notes Community Survey

Marky Roden PSC

For the last two weeks PSC has been asking for input from the ICS community on what companies are planning on doing with their Domino Infrastructure.

If you have not already done so, please take a couple of minutes to help.

The results will be posted next week.

 

http://bit.ly/PSCXPagesSurvey

What is a social presence worth?

Marky Roden Just Marky

We had an interesting discussion internally at work about what exactly does our “Social Presence” do for us? I put time and thought to it and it turns out to be a question I can answer on many levels. I am still not entirely sure what the answer is.

What does being social mean?

Being social means sharing through ideas, code, concepts, dreams….anything really – but sharing it. Within the XPages community we have a multitude of people who are social for many different reasons:

  1. To promote themselves as an individual who is looking for the next big challenge
  2. To promote themselves as a private contractor
  3. To promote themselves as a member/owner of a private company
  4. Because they are just that kind of person who wants to get involved and share
  5. People who were the above once up on a time who have since moved on
  6. All of the above

From my experience, as I have blogged before, I created my social presence purposefully because I wanted to get involved and make myself more employable. That worked fantastically and it also turned out I enjoyed being “social” a lot more than I expected – win win. But that was getting on for 3 years ago (seems like longer) and what does it mean to me today?

But what does my social presence mean to me today?

  1. Well I would like to feel (and I have no desire to test this) that I am considerably more employable than I was 3 years ago. Not because I am a better developer, but because I have an online resume almost second to none, demonstrating my ability as a developer.
  2. Part of the reason PSC Group hired me was not only because of my talent, but because I was a member of the social networks, I knew people and people knew me. This makes for a very compelling story for the company when they talk to potential customers – look at the IBM Champions we have. Through my social presence and presenting at conferences as a PSC employee I have been fortunate enough to have people approach me/us to work with us because they are looking for help/support from XPages experts. People seeking me/PSC out because of what they have seen us do is very flattering.
  3. PSC don’t pay me to be social – I promote PSC as part of my blogs and other online presence by association. I am with PSC by association….The blog exists on my time and I like it that way.
  4. So from the top list I am 1) 4) and a small amount of 3) by association

So what is a social presence worth?

It really depends on who’s perspective you are looking at it from and who is asking.

  • You could say that my social presence is worth the paycheck I get because without it I would not be working at PSC Group.
    That is the truth.
  • You can draw a direct correlation from my social presence to my nomination as IBM Champion this year.
    That is the truth
  • A sales guy could easily put a price on my social presence can be valued in the number of contracts that we get signed based on my contacts and conference appearances. That assumes however that my social goal is to get more business.
    Which is plainly not true.
  • You could say that my social presence is a future investment, you know worst case, I decide to go nuts, runaround the office naked and get banished (unlikely and the pictures would surely dampen my employment prospects).
    Only time will tell on that one…

So it is really a case, of I am really enjoying this. I spoke at Connect 2014, MWLUG and I am looking forward to ConnectED in January. I work for PSC, we are always looking out for the new opportunity and the chance to help people in interesting, challenging projects, large and small. I do all of “this” because I love it 🙂

  • So contact me if you need some help with an XPages Web Development problem, I will do my best to help out.
  • So contact me cos you are bored one day and want to chat about XPages, ExtJS, jQuery, Angular and stuff
  • So contact me if you need help with a Domino, XPages, SharePoint, Java, .Net or general business problem. PSC can help, we have many incredibly smart and experienced people working for us.

In summary

My social presence is worth it’s weight in gold to me, it makes me happy to share with the people I have come to know and love as friends, and I get to meet new people all the time. One day I will be a teacher I am sure, in the mean time this is about as close as it gets to being happy doing what I love.

What is your social presence worth to you?

 

Running an XPages/Angular.js application on a Bluemix site

Marky Roden Angular in XPages, Angular.js, Bluemix, XPages

In this article I will show you how to run an XPages application based on Angular data within a Bluemix based website.

Introduction

For background reading on this article please review my series on Angular.js in XPages starting here. I will be using the application described within that article as the starting point for this article.

A little background on Bluemix

Bluemix is IBM’s new Platform as a Service (PaaS) system which provides the end to end cloud based hosting of application services. For more information check out www.bluemix.net and read up/follow Ryan Baxter‘s blog. Bluemix provides cloud based services including many things ranging from MongoLabs hosting and SMS sending to Node web servers and Static sites.

You can register for a 30 day free trial of Bluemix from the previous link. I strongly suggest you look up bluemix videos on You Tube first to get an idea of what is possible.

For this example we will be creating a static site. And it is really rather simple.

Loading my site into Bluemix

You will need to set yourself up with Cloud Foundry – using the instructions on the Bluemix site. Look at the Quick Start instruction for installation of the Cloud Foundry files. These are the command line tools which are necessary to post your site from local machine to the bluemix site. There are other ways but this is the way I did it.

This entire process took less than 30 minutes – Ryan Baxter is a Bluemix Advocate and it is his job to sell this stuff and help 🙂

from a Skype Conversation

[8/25/2014 11:26:01 AM] Ryan Baxter: hey

Talking about Beer and Angular and Bluemix…..

[8/25/2014 11:36:25 AM] Ryan Baxter: try this
[8/25/2014 11:36:26 AM] Ryan Baxter: https://github.com/cloudfoundry-community/staticfile-buildpack
[8/25/2014 11:36:37 AM] Ryan Baxter: cf push -b https://github.com/cloudfoundry-community/staticfile-buildpack
[8/25/2014 11:36:52 AM] Ryan Baxter: just for hosting static files

and after that – looking at my Bluemix log it took 13 minutes of bug fixing and stupid idiocy to get this up and running – SWEET !!!

  1. I exported the application files from my database:b7
  2. I used the cf tool to create the Bluemix static site and and upload the files (from my c:\xominode folder)b5Looking at the bluemix site I can then see the created static site
    b3 b4
    Looking at the App through the Bluemix interface you can see the files within the applicationb8
  3. I created the necessary CORS headers through my IHS domino.conf file (See this article)
  4. I restarted my Domino HTTP server task
  5. Repeat and debug ‘cos I am an idiot
  6. Voila my Angular.js app running in Bluemix

b1
b2

When I say running in Bluemix I really mean that – because all the files are loaded up on the Bluemix site (view source below) – this truly is a Bluemix hosted application.

b6

 

 Conclusion

While there are many services available in Bluemix for running applications in the cloud, you can also use it to host static websites which use data from non-Bluemix sources. I am not sure there is a practical implication for the example shown above, but you never know. There are always going to be people way smarter than me 🙂