Martin Pradny's blog

 I haven't published my recap after Engage this year and the recent HCL Factory tour in Milan is a great opportunity to write a summary about what's happening in HCL (mostly Domino) space. It's a mix of news about 12.0.2, future directions, and my impressions, so it can be a bit chaotic, but I got the impression that many people see it similarly.  Engage 2022 Engage 2022 was great (as always). I love the atmosphere in Brudges. I visited it once after Engage a few years ago and I was happy to come back. This was also the first time I had the opportunity to speak at Engage, which obviously made it a bit more stressful, but also more fun. Together with Domino Jams, HCL continued conversations with customers and partners about the future of their products at Engage. Many of these ideas were now discussed in greater detail in Milan, some of them were even demoed.  My main takeaways from Engage were: Nomad (web and mobile) are a great addition to Notes family Restyle is a great...

 I wanted to make this work for a very long time, but there were always some parts missing, so I could not get the full process running. Finally, the wait is over. The following paragraphs describe a way to build Notes/Domino apps automatically on a Jenkins server, allowing parallel builds and all "normal" continuous-integration behavior, without having to think too much about Domino specifics. The Problem Until now, I was running my automated builds of Domino apps using Jenkins in two ways: The official headless-designer way, where you need to pass special commands to Domino Designer and hope for the best as the Designer sometimes gets stuck. I have this wrapped inside a Jenkins pipeline, so I have some control and can e.g. avoid parallel builds by using locks on Jenkins, but still, sometimes it just dies. Some of my headless builds run for more than 30 minutes, so it's really hard to quickly spot an issue without actually connecting to the machi...

After playing a bit with HCL Volt locally on my machine, I've decided it's time to make Volt easily accessible for my other devices. Especially, testing a mobile UI always works better when you can directly try it from different devices.

My list of new technologies to try was growing fast in past months, but now I finally can try to catch up with all the cool improvements that can be used to enhance my/your dev experience. Microsoft has enhanced the Windows Subsystem for Linux this year and Docker completely changed the way Docker Desktop for Windows is integrated into the operating system. The most important change for me was that I can finally run Docker Desktop and VMWare Workstation on my machine in parallel. When I was looking for some good use cases to try how it works, HCL Domino was a logical choice. HCL started to even publish official Docker images for every release and some pre-releases are only available as Docker images. I have many test Domino machines running in VMs, but I had no HCL Volt. If you don't know that HCL Volt is - it's a new low-code platform that brings HCL Form Builder experience, now know as HCL Leap, to HCL Domino, which then serves as a data store and application server. Whe...