XPages is now available as an experimental release in Bluemix. As of July 2015, anyone can sign up for a free Bluemix account and try out the new XPages in the cloud capability.

What does Experimental mean?

Within Bluemix there are three levels of capability “completeness”. Experimental, Beta and Production ready. Experimental has no Service Level Agreement, no promise of availability and the code base can change at any time without notice. The reason IBM uses this level of completeness is to test drive an application’s capabilities and to elicit feedback from users. They understand that XPages in Bluemix is different than what we are used to on premesis. There is some getting used to the difference in coding patterns when we want to to “@DbName()” for example is now – bluemixContext.getDataService().findDBName().

So experimental means is that it is not production ready and IBM is honest and open about it. For me, it is better to have something than nothing and exciting to thing that in some small way I might be able to help drive the direction of the platform in this manner. Don’t forget – so can you !

Capabilities

The current version of XPages release on day 1 does not have all the same features as an on premises installation. For one, as a developer you do not have direct access to the server, you do not have programmatic access to the server. Your code will run as a designer, but never as an administrator. You cannot have multiple databases on the same application route. This means that many on premises application cannot just be ported straight to Bluemix. Notes client applications will not run in Bluemix (oh well eh……..)

And at the same time there are features and capabilities within Bluemix that are not available  on premises. Some examples are:

• Scaling you application and running it on multiple instances
• Automatic failure and restart if the application crashes (which is does, this is experimental after all)
• Integration with a multitude of services that do not exist on premises
• Git source control integration at the click of a button
• Devops capabilities like:
  • Automatic Build and deploy
  • Monitoring and Diagnostics
  • API Monitoring tools
• Hybrid capabilities
  • The ability to run an XPage application securely, in the cloud, while accessing data securely through an encrypted tunnel back inside the enterprise.
• and the list goes on……
• Watson
• Twitter
• and on…..

Feedback for IBM

If you have any questions and or would like to get more information on XPages in Bluemix there are a number of ways you can do that:

• Developerworks Bluemix Questions https://developer.ibm.com/answers/smart-spaces/12/bluemix.html
• Stackoverflow: Tag with [Bluemix], [XPages-Runtime], [XPages], [XPages-Service] http://www.stackoverflow.com
• The XPages forum: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/xpagesforum.nsf

So how can I get started?

• Go to http://www.bluemix,net
• Sign up for a 30 day free trial
• Follow the instructions and guides shown below
• Watch videos, read blogs and learn

I started using Bluemix so that I could prepare for XPages arrival, but also so that I could learn new technologies like nodejs and cloudant. As I mentioned before, I strongly recommend you take this as an opportunity to broaden your horizons and learn something new.

Resources

To get you going here are some resources to check out for more information

• XPages runtime help – https://www.ng.bluemix.net/docs/starters/xpages/index.html
• XPages service help – https://www.ng.bluemix.net/docs/services/XPagesNoSQLDatabase/index.html
• XPages Bloilerplate start kit help – https://www.ng.bluemix.net/docs/starters/XPagesStarter/index.html
• Basic capabilities demo – https://developer.ibm.com/bluemix/2015/07/23/xpages-on-bluemix-video
• OpenNTF Extension library – http://extlib.openntf.org

Enjoy

In this article I will look at modifying the out of the box boilerplate application and starting to look at the tooling around the new XPages in Bluemix capability. I will specifically talk about the use of the Bluemix integrated git repository.

Introduction

In the previous article I walked through the basic steps of creating the boilerplate XPages application in Bluemix. So let’s look at what we created and how we can mess with it 🙂

The Dashboard

Looking at the dashboard for our new boilerplate application we can start to see a number of items. On the top right there is an option to Add Git

Continuing will create a git repository within the Bluemix integrated jazz hub repository. Once complete you will see a link to the new repo

Clicking on the link will take you to the repo page

We can immediately see from this image that it is not quite what we normally expect from a “source control repo” for XPages development. The entire NSF is part of the repo……but let’s go with it.

Click on the “Git URL” link to get the URL for the repo

I use source tree for this part of the process – Clone New and use the URL for the repo – you will have to log into IBM as well

Once complete you will have the repo locally – it can then be opened in Domino Designer

As we have seen before – we have the to do boilerplate application – to which we can add a new simple XPage

Note

You must be using the notes ID provided by bluemix for your notes applications.

Build and then close the application in designer

Within Sourcetree – we commit the changes in the master branch and push to repo

Once that is complete we can refresh the jazz hub repo page and see the committed change

When we created this repo in Bluemix, the automatic build and deploy tasks were created as well – so clicking on the “Build and Deploy” tab on the top right takes us the deploy page where we can see this in action

Once that is complete we can go over to our application http://hub.mybluemix.net/ToDo_design.nsf/marky.xsp and there it is

Conclusion

Using this method we are able to upload a new XPage into the application without using the built in tooling in OpenNTF release v13

Caveats

I did have a build issue, don’t know why (experimental code) but clicking the redeploy button fixed it.

Don’t forget to build before you send to Bleumix (duh Marky)

I am not sure I recommend this manner of deploying an application to Bluemix via this method – I just wanted to see if it was possible.

In this article I will explain the XPages in Bluemix application dashboard and what is available to the developer from the Bluemix web interface.

The Dashboard

Once you have created your new XPages application in Bluemix it will appear on the “Dashboard” with a weird spacecraft for an icon.

Clicking on the box will review a lot about your application

Link to the application

Clicking on the link at the top left will open your application in a new window

Clicking on the pencil next to it allows you to edit and / or create an additional subdomain for the application (yes it can have many)

Add Git

Clicking on this link will automatically create a source control site for this application

Memory allocated ($$$)

By default the application has 512M allocated to it. Once XPages in Bluemix goes live this will become more significant – this is the number by which Bluemix determines how much you get charged each month. Throughout Bluemix you are charged by the GigaByte hour. That is the number of Gigabytes utilized by a running application each hour. so in this case 512M for an hour is 0.5 Gigabyte hours. Over a typical month that is 720 hours, or 360GBHours. The free allocation is typically 375hours. So this one application running for a month is all you would have “free”. You can reduce this value through the menu, but what you need will be based on your application. Right now (July 2015) XPages is free – keep an eye on it !!!

VCAP services

On the bottom of the smaller box for IBM XPages NoSQL Database you will see a down arrow – if you click on it you will see what are called the “VCAP” services. These are the Cloud Foundry Environmental Variables.

“Environment variables are the means by which the Cloud Foundry runtime communicates with a deployed application about its environment. This page describes the environment variables that Droplet Execution Agents (DEAs) and buildpacks set for applications.”

This JSON construct is critical to telling Bluemix how the XPages boilerplate application works. When you use the self selection to deploy the application all this information is created on the fly. Looking at the labels for the data they should be relatively self explanatory for a Domino developer.

Digging into the code for the example database – aaaah memories – but I digress…..as normal I am mostly blogging this for my own notes and if someone else happens to get something out of it – great 😀

Design and Data are separate?

So the design and the data are separate – well kinda – in fact “some” of the design is separate and “all” of the data is. Following the instructions on how to deploy the starter code and mess with it I managed to change the database and add a new XPage.

BTW for those who cannot find “Start Coding” it is here….took me ages to find it in front of my nose

Notes client

So the database look like this in the notes client – pretty normal

and viewing the design of this database we can see forms, views and No XPages of worth

The data can be changed through the notes client and immediately represented on the website

The Design

Looking at the boilerplate code which was downloaded from starter code we can see – no data, no form, no views – but there are the XPages

New design elements

So I created a XPage in the Design database and followed the instructions on deploying the new code – it worked

Adding a new form to the VIEW database, failed.

Adding a new form to the DESIGN database worked just fine

Conclusion – So where is everything again?

Views and Data are in the NoSQL database

XPages and Forms and in the Design database

There is a lot to learn here……..and a lot of questions….

In this post I will document my attempt to create my first XPages application in Bluemix. I will be following the documentation (ish) and also clicking around to see what happens. This was written July 2015 and is likely out of date soon after.

OpenNTF

I installed the new ExtLib by downloading the last release, then in designer installing the new eclipse plugin. This is not necessary for the sake of this post but will be later.

Bluemix

Go to the Catalog, then scroll to the bottom and select “Looking for more”

Then from the next page select the XPages Web Starter

You will then get the screen to create the instance – over on the right give it a name – in this case I called it xpages

Select Create

and you will get a screen telling you it is being created

Click on the “Dashboard” link at the top

Click on the box for the new application (xpages in this case)

Then we click on our new application link at the top – http://xpages.bluemix.net and there we have it.

Conclusion

Setting up our first application was a very simple set of clicking options. This is cloud – self service deployment of services and capabilities.