Martin Pradny's blog

Last month I had opportunity to speak at ICS.UG user group together with Martin Jinoch. It was great event as I mentioned in previous post. Our slides are available on ICS.UG session list, but I also want to publish demo video and GIT repository that I used for the demo. I wanted to do some cleanup first, but as time didn't permit me to do so, I publish it just as it was for the conference. It really just a proof-of-concept that put together pieces that I would use separately otherwise. Slides: Video: I had to move mymouse all the time to get correct recording, so please ignore it. It's no voodoo.  Repository: https://bitbucket.org/pradnik/ics.ug-demo  Next plans are to all of this on current project that also involves Open NTF Domino API and XPages Scaffolding, which probably will make some parts more complicated.   

Last week I had an opportunity to visit and speak at ICS.UG in Bremen and then continue seamlessly to Engage user group in Ghent. Both events were amazing and transport between them organized by We4IT was more than special, a beer-bus with actual bar inside. I still wonder whether it is legal, definitely would not be in US. I ’ve been to several user groups in past, so I can compare them to recent events. Here are my thoughts: Venues and organization Every year events are better organized and take place in nicer venues. This is especially true for Engage where Theo is raising the bar for all conferences every year. It’s going to be hard to keep this pace, but everyone is doing their best. Sponsors This year there were many new names I never heard of, some of the classic ones were missing. It’s still good sign about the market as there are definitely people interested in IBM collaboration space. Also giveaways from sponsors are getting better every year. People ...

It's been long since I wrote my last post. For part of that period I completely left world of Domino and XPages. During that time also many interesting XPages technologies and project appeared or got more popular. One of them is build automation using Maven, so my plan for holidays was to check recent posts from  Christian  and  Jesse  about mavenization of XPages libraries. Before I got to them, a friend of mine called with a request for PDF creation on Domino. It was not for an XPages app, but anyway it seemed like a good fit for POI4XPages, which could be built by Maven. I agreed to create small demo for him. Main goal was to generate an order document which also contains table of items. It will be called by a button on classic notes form, so the plan was to use  URLOpen to download it from the server. Problem that comes with this is that users won't be authenticated, so custom security and session as signer is needed. I had some prior experience with POI...

This topic will lead to a series of articles. It depends how deep I will get, but I will try to stay as much general as possible and avoid solutions that work just in my current case. It's all inspired by nice hack that Maks Zhuk showed in his blogpost http://mzhuk.blogspot.com/2014/02/unit-tests-for-lotus-domino-applications.html . Since I want to automate everything, I'll take it step further with Gradle. XPages run on top of a OSGi runtime and so they use system of features and plugins. This can lead to some dependency troubles when you just want to do plain Java work. Christian Guedemann showed how to make this work nicely with Maven http://guedebyte.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/automated-build-with-jenkins-some-progress/ . Sadly Gradle can't read p2 update sites, which can Maven do using Tycho plugin. Even when you try to Mavenize it in some standard way like using eclipse:to-maven, I couldn't use it afterwards since some plugins contain jars as libs in them (pro...