On January 21st IBM announced that the XPages Runtime as entering the beta release phase. The announcement was posted on developerworks By Brian Gleeson – https://developer.ibm.com/bluemix/2016/01/21/announcing-beta-release-ibm-xpages-runtime/ This signifies a very important milestone in the process of becoming a fully fledged member of the Bluemix family of capabilities.

What does Beta mean?

Well first of all the runtime now appears on the main catalog and no longer hidden in the experimental section. You can find it in the main catalog under Runtimes and when you create a new application is part of the list of runtimes available.

Beta also means that there is an expectation of reliability within the cloud. Going through the Beta phase means that although IBM are not fully committed to their SLAs for delivery quite yet, they are basically expecting the runtime to perform as if it was. This means a more reliable availability, and more importantly, IBM cannot just “make changes and take stuff down” as they feel like it. Being experimental means that there is no guarantee of it even being there tomorrow.

Beta means that we can start to talk to customers about it as a real possibility. Once again, Beta means that IBM is expecting people to actually start to create prototype applications which can be used in real discussions for Application Modernization and migration scenarios.

Beta means that the end goal initial release is now much clearer. Going through the experimental phase we have seen a large number of improvements and changes to both the runtime and the OpenNTF Extension Library releases support the programmatic interaction with it. IBM’s intention is to support a hybrid model with the release of XPage in Bluemix. Currently, we do not know the future of the XPagesNoSQL service but that is still experimental.

IBM is pressing forward with the release of the runtime and the Hybrid model. For more information on this, check out another post by Brian on YoutTube (https://youtu.be/WsjQ4hjJ10E). The Hybrid model means the ability to run a trusted server in the Bluemix container and having it securely interact with your Domino server(s) back within the corporate environment. This means the data and authentication model does not leave the company, while the runtime can be used to take advantage of all the cloud foundry capabilities like fail-over, multi-instance deployments and much more.

Beta means that this is real people – most of the investment by the XPages development team, under the guidance of Pete Janzen has been in preparing XPages for Bluemix. This is a significant step in the product evolution. I fully expect that more information will be released in the App.Next presentation to be given at Connect 2016. Hopefully the expected deadline for the full release date will be shared.

More announcements coming soon

For those of you going to Connect make sure you check out the sessions on the XPages runtime and Bluemix

1529: IBM Domino App.Next – Broadening Your Horizons with Bluemix

1075: The XPages of Things: Integrate Bluemix with Your XPages Applications for a World of Possibilities