Effective Xpages development or how to use OpenNTF

 Hello, from my last blog post you can deduce, that my current work occupation has changed a bit. The truth is, that currently I am participating on development of controls for Xpages. Xpages is IBM technology for very rapid web development and it shares pretty much ideology of everything server side. So is you are REST based person, this wont be for you. But still you can use REST inside Xpages, so its not so much separated. Not just REST but support for many other things can be found inside Xpages. There are some basic components in core of Xpages, but if you would like to do sth. more with it, I strongly recommend to use Xpages Extension Library. 

It can be found here and everything you will need is Eclipse, IBM Domino server, Lotus notes client and SVN client. Currently there is few project running simultaneously under name of extension library. It is:connections, domino, features, group, mobile, oneui and sametime. I am currently working on mobile components, so in the future, there could be even more mobile support for Xpages. Even now you can build nice native looking application in xpages, with ability to assign custom skins to it, so it can have different look on android iphone or any other device.

I also recommend to take a look on examples, which can be found in XPagesExt.nsf. Dont be fooled by welcome screen. There is much more of examples, you just need to use specific path to .xsp file to access them. For example myserver.com/XPagesExt.nsf/Mobile_Test.xsp , which will give you demo of currently existing mobile components.

Also notice, that OpenNTF connections gives you nice ability to integrate your Xpages application with your IBM Connections. Fortunately connections features REST API so you can connect with it almost from anywhere. This allows you to automatically post things on your profile wall or create/delete communities, activities or anything you want. Also there is great search API which could be really handy.

OpenNTF become in last years for IBM and Xpages one of the main deployment platforms especially because of the ability to deploy immediately without big testing effort (off course testing is done, but not in such a big scale). It is really great to see IBM to give out sth. free and open, hopefully this will last for longer. 

But OpenNTF is not just about Xpages and extension library, you can find there many more usefull IBM stuff, for example Lotus Quickr widgets, which are also some, on which I have been working on. So enjoy OpenNTF and if you have some time, send a nice mail to those folks for all the great work they are doing, why deserve it. Also it can persuade IBM about meaningfulness of this effort.