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

In this article I will demonstrate how we can set up a new searchable REST service in an Bluemix XPages environment.

Introduction

This article was driven by a question on Twitter from Paul Ramos (@parf82) who asked how to search a database in Bluemix. The answer is of course, in the same way that you search it not in Bluemix, using an FTSearch. The more pertinent questions is really how to make the XPages runtime find the application to search in the first place.

Creating the base application

If you follow this video by Brian Gleeson you will be able to create your first application in Bluemix. Once you have that you can manipulate the environment to your hearts content. There are multiple, documented, methods for updating your XPages environment in Bluemix, I prefer to create a Git repository. As Toby and I demonstrated in the socialbizug webcast you can download the application design, manipulate it and send it back to Bluemix as one.

Manipulating the boilerplate

I have the initial boilerplate code cloned to my local hard drive.

First step it to edit the Manifest and get rid of the Boilerplate application. Why, you ask? Well this way you have the manifest and everything else configured for you nicely. You can do this from scratch but I generally find this mentally easier to work through.

I renames the application from todo_design to xpages_design.

I took a design copy of my extjs database and saved it in the git repo folder. The database can be seen at (http://demo.xomino.com/xomino/extjs.nsf) which is at it’s heart just a modified fakenames.nsf database (http://www.xpagescheatsheet.com) from David Leedy.

The reason I chose this database is that it contains a lot of REST services already in a normal XPages environment.

I then had to create a copy of the database itself in the Bluemix NoSQL environment.

Quick review

We now have the database split into two separate pieces

1. The data on slaney/bluemix
   1. https://xpages-domino.ng.bluemix.net//bluemix/PSC_Playground/Hybrid/extjs.nsf/ByName-First
2. The design xpages_design.nsf – currently in my local git repo

Putting the data directly on slaney – very possible and works in a view as expected

But if we try and access an XPage – it doesn’t work – which is what we would expect.

Accessing the data from the XPages runtime

Back in our xpages_design database we are going to create a normal REST service – but we have to use the new BluemixContext object to find out the path for the service (https://www.ng.bluemix.net/docs/services/XPagesNoSQLDatabase/index.html#xpservice_portexisting).

				<xe:restService id="restService3" pathInfo="byFirstNameBlue">
					<xe:this.service>
						<xe:viewJsonService viewName="ByName-First" start="0" count="100" defaultColumns="true" databaseName="#{javascript:bluemixContext.isRunningOnBluemix()? bluemixContext.getDataService().getHost()+'!!' + bluemixContext.getDataService().getRootDir() + 'extjs.nsf' : 'extjs.nsf'}">
						</xe:viewJsonService>
					</xe:this.service>
				</xe:restService>

The bluemixContext values are derived from the VCAP_Services variables made available to the XPages in Bluemix service through Cloud Foundry. An example is shown here – it is available from the Bluemix dashboard for your XPages by clicking on the ^ arrow on your NoSQL database service.

Viewing the result

Once we have pushed the REST service design changes back up to Bluemix we should be able to see them. Once we correctly create the URL to the rest service. In this case “xpages_design.nsf/xRestService.xsp/byFirstNameBlue”

http://xpages.mybluemix.net/xpages_design.nsf/xRestService.xsp/byFirstNameBlue

We are able to demonstrate the new searchable REST service by manually modifying the URL and adding search parameters:

http://xpages.mybluemix.net/xpages_design.nsf/xRestService.xsp/byFirstNameBlue?open&search=smith

Conclusion

In this article we have seen that we are still able to use the XPages out of the box rest service to communicate between the design database and the “data” database. All the out of the box functionality is available as if it were an on premises application. We also saw the usage of the new bluemixContext to find out where the data database resides within Bluemix.

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.