Nevermind.dk

3 simple wishes for Lotus Notes Domino at LotusPhere 2012

Jesper B. Ki�r — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 23:00:00 GMT

Sadly I am not going to LotusPhere 2012..so instead I will make a short list of 3 wishes for LS 2012 of what could make Lotus Notes/Domino an even better platform 1. Evolution of the NFS database Time has passed but the NSF database has mainly stayed the same. There has been little evolution over the years, mainly IO performance optimization etc. What is really needed is evolution on a higher level. Facts are that really nothing has changed much the last 20 years, if you look at things from a higher perspective. What is really really needed? Relations! No no.., I am not talking about RDMS, I am talking about Graph Databases! Learn from other NoSQL databases, like Neo4J but mostly OrientDB OrientDB has very much in common with the NSF database, and in many cases it resembles a version of what NSF could have been today Have a look at OrientDB and be pleasantly surprised OrientDB will be released as a version 1.0 very soon. My Wish: Make NSF database support Graphs..this will make the NSF ROCK! 2. CoffeScript Rocks..JavaScript Sucks Look it up on the internet, and you will see there are tons of things wrong with JavaScript. The problem is that some "idiot" from Netscape a long time ago created JavaScript when Netscape ruled the browser world and JavaScript got stuck as a "de facto" coding language in the browser. Unfortunately nobody cared to tell Netscape that is was a "piece of crap" and it needed reworking, so we all have to live that many years later. So what can you do? JavaScript won't go away, it will not be fixed, though it is being mended over the years, ...but that is not enough... CoffeScript to the rescue! What is CoffeScript ? It is a much cleaner language that transcompiles into JavaScript, a facade, a syntactic sugar. Watch this very recent and great video from its inventor My Wish: Make XPages use CoffeScript as an alternative via a plugin or whatever. I really mean "transcompile" CoffeScript to JavaScript and "trans-decompile" JavaScript back to Coffescript This would give SSJS (SSCS) a BIG boost in readability, productivity and overall just a much much nicer coding experience 3. Easy styling and layout. XPages should never have been based on JSF, but it is. If you think JSF is a light weight, agile web framework, you are probably not aware what else is "out there" (Play Framework, Rails, ...) Do a Google search "JSF sucks" and there is plenty of angry hits. Well aggregated here "JSF sucks". When James Gosling says "I hate JSF with a passion" maybe there is something about it...I mean this is the guy who invented Java! OK, JSF is here to stay in XPages, so I will make my wish gentle. My Wish: Give me something light, visual and easy to use and understand for laying out and designing my XPages. Not something stupid and complicated like the bloated Themes stuff in XPages. IBM ...this is 2012..you know?

Watch out ..working with web services in 8.5.3 may (will) wipe all your Working Sets ....completely

Jesper B. Ki�r — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 23:00:00 GMT

This has happen for me tonight..twice. After having been working with some web services, Java and LotusScript I have found that every single Working Set is completely empty the next time the Designer is started. OK, maybe it is just IBM's way of saying web services is overrated anyway .......

Upgrading to 8.5.3 Upgrade Pack 1, a bit messy journey

Jesper B. Ki�r — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:00:00 GMT

Today I downloaded the Lotus Notes/Domino 8.5.3 Upgrade Pack 1, ran the installer and it quit with an error. Naive as I was I thought it was a simple install procedure. Well if you have not installed any of the extLib from OpenNTF, it is. But I have had the pleasure of the early versions of the ExtLib, so I had to go the messy route. Per Henrik Lausten made me aware of the Install guide, which has some important points. In short it is: - make a change to a config file - get rid of all the old ExtLib. You would think that this would be a job for the installer, but no you must manually delete all references. You must remove ALL old ExtLib files or the installer won't continue. When I got the installer working without an error I actually uninstalled the Upgrade Pack 1 by mistake. A small typo with a big difference confused me. In the last dialog there is an error in the Danish text. No matter what the installer always says it has uninstalled the Upgrade Pack. This made me run the installer a couple of times extra until I saw the error... :-).

How to use the Pidgin IM instead of the Notes 8.5.3 embeddded Sametime, when the client does not behave well

Jesper B. Ki�r — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 23:00:00 GMT

My embedded Sametime IM in my Lotus Notes 8.5.3 client does not behave well at all. I am a member of notesnet.dk, a network of Lotus Notes freelance consultants and we have a Sametime server to communicate with each other. After upgrading my Notes client to version 8.5.3 it has be nothing but trouble it feels. The Sametime server was upgraded and since then a bunch of error messages keep popin' up. I was advised to upgrade the embedded client by the admin and I did. That did remove the error messages, but instead I got some new ones and from one day on the list of uses did not show anymore Instead when hovering over the list a puzzling message would show. Sametime is just WAY to sensitive to version issues etc! (no wonder Sametime has gotten a bad reputation). So why not go for the stuff the works! The Pidgin Instant Messenger. Pidgin supports a bunch of IM standards: AIM Bonjour Gadu-Gadu Google Talk Groupwise ICQ IRC MSN MXit MySpaceIM SILC SIMPLE Sametime XMPP Yahoo! Zephyr Creating an account is really easy Easy? Yes But this will NOT work, you will get a "version mismatch" error.. Let's fix this. Shut down the Pidgin client. You need to open up the config file for Pidgin "accounts.xml" to do some changes which on window 7 will be at C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\.purple Go down to the Sametime section for the account you have just created. 1 1533 0 im@abc.com Replace it with this: 1 8511 1533 0 im@abc.com 4608 and now I should work :-)

Researcher’s Video Shows Secret Software on Millions of Phones Logging EVERYTHING and the data being send to their servers

Jesper B. Ki�r — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 23:00:00 GMT

This is REALLY scary. The security setup on a Android device a already a complete joke and useless, On top of that a Android developer has reveled that a "spying" software (rather a rootkit) from IQ software is installed on your phone. In the background the IQ Software monitors EVERYTHING and sends it to their servers. EVERYTHING meaning EVERYTHING, SMS messages, keystrokes even data send via a secure HTTPS connection From wired.com: Researcher’s Video Shows Secret Software on Millions of Phones Logging Everything

This great website will help you through the pitfalls of JavaScript - go there now!

Jesper B. Ki�r — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 23:00:00 GMT

JavaScript is a language which has a lot skeletons in its closet. If you don't know exactly what you doing, it is going to end up in a wrong way, or in a way you had not anticipated. There is a great website "JavaScript Garden" which will help through the pitfalls. From the website: "It gives advice to avoid common mistakes and subtle bugs, as well as performance issues and bad practices, that non-expert JavaScript programmers may encounter on their endeavours into the depths of the language" Go there now! : JavaScript Garden

Linux Tip: Running a program with a GUI on a remote PC from your local PC.

Jesper B. Ki�r — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 23:00:00 GMT

Sometimes is not enough having access to a remote PC from a terminal, you may need to have access to a program which has a GUI. The great thing about Linux it is (may be) very simple. What you want to do is redirect the X-Windows GUI for the remote program to your local PC and this is what you need to do: - Open a Terminal/Command Prompt . - sudo ssh -XY -l root 192.168.1.5 is an example of redirecting X-Windows from the 192.168.1.5 to your PC Sudo is running a program with security privileges of another user (here root) SSH is a Secure Shell, the connection to the server is encrypted - X option is Enables X11 forwarding - Y option is Enables trusted X11 forwarding - l root login on remote PC as root 192.168.1.5 the IP of the remote PC You will first be prompted for your password for the local PC (sudo) and then the password for the user to be used on the remote PC (here root) When the passwords have been accepted try Gedit from the prompt. If it is working as expected the gedit editor will will show on your local PC. It is running on the remote PC and saving the file will save the file on the remote PC, which is great! This the great thing about Linux, it is a multi-user system, not like MS Windows which a single-user system. This is why this is possible and several users could be doing this at the same time on the remote PC running Linux

ViewPanel performance issue confirmed by IBM.

Jesper B. Ki�r — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 23:00:00 GMT

I have written about performance ViewPanel issues in An XPage ViewPanel is 279 times slower than the same web view in Domino and other entries on my blog. Fortunately the XPages architect Philippe Riand toke notice of my troubles and left a comment on my blog entry. I contacted him and he got a copy of my troubled NSF. Next day he confirmed the issue and they would look into it over the next weeks and keep me updated on the issue . (Apparently it is only in special use cases the problems arise). I think that is very nice to see that the people behind XPages takes so much pride in their work, that they personally react to such matters. Kudos to Philippe Riand! :-)

XPages Viewpanel Pagers are performance killers and need to be reworked.

Jesper B. Ki�r — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 23:00:00 GMT

An Update to my blog entry: An XPage ViewPanel is 279 times slower than the same web view in Domino Per Henrik Lausten asked me on Tweeter, am I using Pagers in the view? Good question! :-) Since it was a standard ViewPanel, YES! Removing it completely would bring the timing down to about 4 seconds! Still slow but not ....very very very slow. Apparently the Domino server recounts entries in the view and recalculates numbers of pages every time a category is expanded/collapsed. So I thought by changing the pager type to only have Previous/Next the problem would be fixed, right? Nope >25 seconds again. IBM should understand, doing Paging isn't an exact science...only a rough estimates of how many is perfect in most cases. Why is a number of entries not cached? or saved in the view? The number may not be 100% correct and updated, just close would be fine IBM should make an option on the Pager like: Pager counter updating: Exact or Lazy/Fuzzy counting And depending on you type of application and number of documents, you could choose your preferred option (I don't even dare think of had there been any Reader fields on my documents..... )

An XPage ViewPanel is 279 times slower than the same web view in Domino

Jesper B. Ki�r — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 23:00:00 GMT

I have a database where I pick information on who is visiting my websites. and I thought I would start moving some of the viewing of the data to XPages. So I took my default view and moved into a ViewPanel on a XPage, just to have a quick view of the data from a XPages perspective. The collapsed view loads in about a second, but expanding a category takes a jaw-dropping 25 seconds! Well actually at first I could not even expand the category since the XPage would time-out, because of the default 20 seconds time-out limit. Adding this : would solve the time-out problem, but ...25 seconds?? Trying the same view in an "Old School out of the box Domino view": 25,12/0,144=177 times slower in XPages than a standard Domino web view well getting the actual view data from the server only took 90ms, so it is even worse . 25,12/0,09=279 times slower in XPages than a standard Domino web view for getting the view data. That is a horrible difference. The database has about 30.000 documents and the view has 3 categorized columns, so it's really nothing special in that sense. For XPages not already getting a bad reputation on performance, I suggest IBM start investigating how to get their M in MVC to act together with the rest in way that is actually useful in real world scenarios and not only in demos and POCs