Author: lekkim

Positive, competent, out-spoken, frank and customer focused architect and developer with a strong foundation in web, cloud and product development. I'm a strong advocate for API first and cloud based solutions and development. I have a knack for being able to communicate and present technically complicated matters in conference, customer and training settings. I've previously acted as team member and leader in a product organisation.

Lotusphere 2009: Lotus changes the game!

I might have been out sick all day yesterday but I’ve seen enough during the week to be confirmed in the fact that IBM Lotus is changing the game when it relates to collaboration. XPages is great and will change the way applications are developed for the platform. This has been discussed online in the Yellow Bubble earlier but to see the XPage excitement by “the general public” is new and very nice to see.

XPages is a game changer. No doubt about it!

Seeing the stuff that Stephan Wissel showed in his Practical DXL Magic session only confirmed this. Remember that XPages is just XML underneath and one of his demos Stephan demoed how to create XPages from Notes view and Notes forms using DXL and XSLT. Now try to do equivalent stuff on any other platform!

Great stuff!

Lotusphere 2009: AD215 – Practical DXL Magic

Just sat through Stephan Wissels session on DXL and it was great. Good slides, not too many of them, excellent demos and altogether a great session. Way to go!

Below are the cliff notes.

  • IResource in DDE returns DXL
  • DXL Studio by Stephan Wissel
  • DXL Explorer
  • Setting setForceNoteFormat=”true” makes export round trip safe but not usable for anything else than round tripping (== binary)
  • stream out has to be UTF-8
  • Switch of “Compile LotusScript” to avoid script related import options; you can always recompile later
  • Watch out for line break issues; improvements needed; work from DOM tree in memory
  • If export fails try exporting design elements one by one; issue is probably a race condition as an 88 millisecond wait between design elements makes it work
  • Get a decent XSLT/XPath editor – NO Notepad/vi
  • Approx. 156k lines of LotusScript in all IBM templates – thought it would be more (based on 69 templates
  • Cocomo tool for estimating how much time it takes to redo code
  • Cool demo showing how to transform a view to a XPage, some copy/pasting required but it works like a charm
  • Even cooler demo transforming a view to a XPage, again copy/pasting required but worked perfectly

Lotusphere 2009: What should be part of TEK CHECK?

Those who do not speak at Lotusphere might not know this but as a speaker you are required to go to the presentation venue the night before your presentation and do a mandatory TEK CHECK. This is basically to make your computer can connect to the presentation projector etc. Seeing my share of sessions this week it has again become clear that a couple of checks should be added to the TEK CHECK or added to the presentation check that also occurs before the presentation.

Some would say that it’s basic presentation guidelines but I think the following should be enforced:

  • If using bullets keep it to 5 or 6 per slide
  • Don’t use a font smaller than 20 points
  • If showing code use a proportional font such as Courier
  • If demoing in an IDE remember to increase the font size
  • Make sure the resolution you’re using still allows for people to read the slides and demos clearly from the back rows

Lotusphere 2009: Getting better

So I’m slowly getting better. After having tried to ignore being sick for Sunday and Monday I finally gave in on Tuesday and went to bed with a high fever. I’m slowly getting better and I seem to have gotten rid of the fever this afternoon (Wednesday afternoon). I’m probably going to skip the party tonight hoping I’ll be able to do the last conference day tomorrow.

Lotusphere 2009: Tuesday program

Here’s my program for Tuesday:

  • 8-9.45, SHOW109 (mobile apps), SW Osprey
  • 10-11, AD213, CompApp components, DL N Hem. A-C
  • 11.15-12.15, BP207, Domino Admin to WAS Admin, SW 3-4
  • 12.30-2.15, SHOW105, Sidebar safari, SW Osprey
  • 3-4, UCC keynote, Dolphin N Hem.
  • 4.30-6, Blogger-only thing
  • 7-??, customer dinner at Shulas

Quite a packed program today.