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.