Engage is the most successful LUG in Europe, and as usual I am slightly bewildered by how Theo Heselmans, our gracious host, manages to pull it off. The venue was lovely, the opening session room stunning, and the content was very high quality. I really enjoyed meeting many community members whom I had only seen online, including a couple of my Stackoverflow saviours (Per, nice to have met you!)
The city of Ghent itself was a nice surprise. The inner city is full of history, with many old buildings harking back to a more prosperous past, and a surprising number of churches. I had a little walk to the north of the city, though, and it’s obvious that the city went through an industrial phase which it got out of and has not really recuperated from.
Here are my technical take homes from the whole two day session:
Both Ulrich Krause and Frank van den Linden independently confirmed that they didn’t like the new ‘Java’ element and found the oldskool WEB-INF folder stabler.
Theo Heselmans presented some of the Javascript frameworks he’s been using; I knew Bootstrap and Backbone; he recommended Ratchet and Knockout as well. Also, if you want to store local stuff, the way to go nowadays is no longer cookies but the manifest or local storage.
John Daalsgard had a good session explaining the Domino REST API; I learned lots of stuff but was sort of disappointed that authentication was not really talked about. Most of the examples were using anonymous access, and authentication is still not really an easy thing to do. Paul Harrisson, who did the local web application for engage, pointed me to his blog entry about authentication. I’ve been working with Julian Buss’ framework DominoToGo and I was initially under the impression that the REST Services introduced in 9.0.1 would mitigate its usefulness but I’m coming to the conclusion that as soon as you get out of the demo-cases ‘simple text’ and ‘anonymous access’ things start getting complicated using REST, i.e. one has got to start coding things oneself.
One of the most interesting sessions was the one on GIT done by Martin Jinoch and Jan Krejcarek. Martin was very stern and he endeavoured to persuade us to abandon the idea that the source code resides within the NSF and that the Git repository is the backup. Rather, the source code is in GIT and the NSF is just a throwaway, last-minute build construct. I almost broke in tears. Martin also admonished us to turn everything off that automatically builds, including the nsf to on-disk-project sync.
I was also relieved to hear that other fellow developers were irritated by ‘false positives’, i.e. files that have been touched, and therefore appear in the staging area of git, but whose code has not been practically modified, and therefore are really cluttering. There is a project called DORA which alleviates this, but it only works if one starts the project with it. Implementing it midway is bad, apparently (thanks to Serdar).
The London Developer Co-op was there in force, with a stand even, and showed us a very polished product for data exporting. I can see use cases if customers just want to store their data somewhere else, to finally kill off the remnants of their Domino infrastructure, but the fact that the business logic does not get exported will still represent a large exit barrier.
Mark Leuksink and Frank van den Linden introduced me also independently to bower, a package manager that manages the javascript library dependencies automatically for you. The idea here, if you’re doing an XPages project, to have bower point at your ods structure and do the updates here. You’ll need to press F9 in the package explorer before syncing the project.
In the mindblowing categories, Nathan Freeman showed the Graph construct he has made available within the OpenNTF Domino API. Documents stored in nsf without views? That’s just weird. Possibly illegal. And whereas I can see obvious advantages in terms of speed when the data structure is already known in advance, especially for transversal, multi-layered searches like ‘show me the persons who know the persons I know’, I’m not sure how the Graph concept would deal with ad-hoc requests, or with a change in the underlying data structure. I would really like to see what sort of measurements one can make as to the performance of data writing and reading, especially in large numbers. The demonstrations as well were built from scratch, and worked well, and I’d be very interested to see what happens when one takes an existing data landscape and ‘graphs’ it.
The final session I attended was from Paul Withers and Daniele Vistalli. Paul presented the newest possibilities of the next version of OpenNTF Domino API. They are introducing a concept of metaversalID which is a combination of database replicaID and Document Universal ID, and apparently the code has been made Maven-compatible. It looks like we will have, in conjunction with Christian Güdemann’s work on an eclipse builder, soon a system where we can start thinking of continuous builds. We’ll be big boys, then, finally.
Daniele introduced the Websphere Liberty Server. I had dismissed the Websphere server as a huge, lumbering IBM monster but apparently the Liberty Server is small and lightweight. And then, doing some magic, Paul and Daniels made the Liberty Server behave just like a Domino server. The demonstration was still very much in beta stage, and I’m not clear as to the implications of this tour de force. But it might be a game-changer.
my non-technical take homes:
When travelling, bring two phone chargers. With the iPhones losing juice so quickly, losing your charger leaves you strangely vulnerable and incommunicado. Thanks to Ben Poole for letting me load up at the LDC Via stand.
It is unwise to start debating with Nathan Freeman at 2.30 in the morning after everyone else has been kicked out of the hotel bar, and Nathan has a bottle of tequila in an ice bucket.
Hi Andrew, we really did not intend to make you cry 🙂 But I did mean what I said very seriously. I’m sure switching this sourcecode/ntf “perspective” can help developers to start doing it the right way and will help them to avoid mistakes, that I did. And I did all of them. As I always do…
I accept no responsibility for conference conversations after 1am. 😀
Serious, I had a wonderful time talking with you. Let’s do it some more.
Oh, and a Liberty server that acts like a Domino server is most certainly a game-changer. There simply is no end of what we can accomplish with a lightweight, robust, modern J2EE web server combined with the power of native NSF. Since the ODA turns NSF into a multi-modal database, we can choose a best suited approach to how we manage data that’s independent of the HTTP services normally provided by Domino. And with the forthcoming addition of a JSON REST mode for the ODA, we’ll put NSF on par with Mongo and Couchbase as a data service platform. We might not match performance characteristics in the near term, but in terms of capabilities we can move essentially as far as we have clear market demand for features (improved multi-tenancy, better transaction isolation, integration with Lucene, etc)
CrossWorlds effectively makes the HTTP layer of the Domino server into one of the most advanced web application servers on the market. We’ve been arguing that Domino is a web app server for over a decade, but now we can do it in a way that aligns with the market’s definition of “application server.”