Tip of the Iceberg

Category xpages
Medusa 0.7 has been released. The release package includes detailed installation instructions. Here's a brief list of features the plugin contains:

• Server-side DOM Tree: similar to the HTML inspection of the base Firebug plugin, Medusa allows you to navigate the structure of the XPage as it exists in memory on the server. Clicking any node in the tree displays a ridiculous amount of property information for the corresponding control; if the control has an equivalent client-side HTML element, and that element can be located on the page, Medusa will highlight that element in the page.
• Log Console: gone are the days of having to settle for print() and _dump() to send debugging information to the server console / log. Medusa includes a method for collecting error reports and purely informational debug statements for the active page... so the debug data you're viewing is not only limited to your session, it's specific to the page you're viewing. Say goodbye to filling up the server log with stack traces and fighting with coworkers over whose debug statements are whose.
• Command Line: issue SSJS or EL commands within Firebug to be executed in the context of the open page. And not just the context of the page... if you've selected a control node in the DOM tree, the command will be executed in the scope of that control. For example, if you have a label with a "value" attribute (display text) of "First Name:", select that label in Medusa's DOM panel, and execute the following SSJS:
  
  this.setValue("Given Name:");
  
  When you click "Send", Medusa will execute the command, trigger a partial refresh specific to that control, and you'll see the label's display text change. Just as the core Firebug feature set allows you to tweak the client-side rendering of a web page to determine what your server-side code should be, Medusa's command line actually allows you to tweak the server-side page structure until it looks/behaves the way you want, drastically reducing development time.

If you develop with XPages, you need this. That's why we wrote Medusa, and now we release her into the wild to see what she will become.

Posted by Tim Tripcony At 1:39 PM Location Canton | Permalink | Comments (5)

Category xpages

Posted by Tim Tripcony At 8:59 AM Location Canton | Permalink | Comments (4)

Category xpages

During AD111, I mentioned that SSJS supports custom @Functions, but advised against defining your own. My primary reason for advising against it is the possibility that IBM may, in a future version of Domino, implement their own version of whatever custom function you decided to define. Back when version 6 was released, I saw far too many apps break because developers had defined their own LotusScript Replace() function in previous versions.

On the other hand, XPages are capable of so much by comparison to traditional Notes apps that it's inevitable that we'll occasionally identify functionality we'd like to encapsulate into a function that IBM probably will never make a part of the core product. So here's an example of a handy custom @Function that I doubt will ever be native to the XPages implementation of SSJS:

importPackage(javax.xml.parsers);
var @GoogleSuggest = function(partial:string) {
    var resultKey = "googleSuggest-" + partial;
    if (!(applicationScope.containsKey(resultKey))) {
        var results = [];
        var baseUrl:string = "http://google.com/complete/search?output=toolbar&q=";
        var factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
        var parser = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
        var domResult:DOMDocument = parser.parse(baseUrl + partial);
        var resultNodes:DOMNodeList = domResult.getElementsByTagName("suggestion");
        for (var nodeIndex:int = 0; nodeIndex < resultNodes.getLength(); nodeIndex++) {
            var resultNode:DOMElement = resultNodes.item(nodeIndex);
            results.push(resultNode.getAttribute("data"));
        }
        results.sort();
        applicationScope.put(resultKey, results);
    }
    return applicationScope.get(resultKey);
};

If you add that to a SSJS script library, then add the library as a resource on an XPage, then you can easily set the typeahead for any edit box to be the Google Suggest results for whatever value the user types:

<xp:inputText id="search">
    <xp:typeAhead mode="partial" minChars="3" var="partial"
        valueList="#{javascript:@GoogleSuggest(partial)}">
    </xp:typeAhead>
</xp:inputText>

Posted by Tim Tripcony At 11:02 AM Location Canton | Permalink | Comments (5)

Category lotusphere
Sorry it's long overdue, but in response to several inquiries I've posted the slides and example database from my Lotusphere session with Stephan. Be sure to check out his post about rendering ODF documents in XPages; it provides step-by-step instructions for using one of the features included in our example database.

Posted by Tim Tripcony At 11:27 AM Location Canton | Permalink | Comments (1)

Category musings
For the past few years, I've posted some form of "annual review" on, or in the vicinity of, the last day of the calendar year. This year when the proverbial ball dropped I was simply far too busy to engage in such reflection.

Posted by Tim Tripcony At 11:47 PM Location Home | Permalink | Comments (6)

Category lotusphere
Now that the full session agenda for Lotusphere 2010 has been posted, I've actually planned ahead this year and decided in advance what sessions I want to attend. While this may of course change, please consider this both my recommendation for each of the sessions listed and a roadmap to find me at the conference should you (for whatever reason) wish to do so... of course, outside of the timeslots listed below, I'll likely either be hurriedly cramming for my own session or holed up in Kimono's.* While the rest of these may be subject to change, I'm quite certain I'll be attending this one.

Posted by Tim Tripcony At 2:37 AM Location Home | Permalink | Comments (3)

Category symphony
As a followup to my last post, here's something that I somehow completely missed a few weeks ago (despite posts about if from Scott Treggiari, Mitch Cohen, Stuart McIntyre, and Arne Nielsen):

IBM, VMware and Keepod products family manufacturer NSEC, today announced that they have partnered to offer IBM's Lotus Symphony productivity software suite on Keepod devices for the first time.

What's a Keepod? Apparently, it's a roughly credit-card-sized portable hard drive with a built-in USB connector, designed to be the ultimate portable application/data container: plug it into any PC, Mac, or Linux machine and, not only can you access your portable data, but you can run a pretty comprehensive set of applications directly from the device, regardless of the host OS, without leaving a trace of those applications (or your data) on that host. Sounds pretty handy.

Since they range in price from 29 EUR ($42) for a 2GB card to 69 EUR ($101) for a 16GB (NOTE: these prices include shipping, so you might pay a bit less, especially if you live in Europe), I'm not quite intrigued enough yet to try one of these, given that I can snag a 16GB Micro SD card (with SD adapter) on NewEgg for about $40 or a 32GB thumb drive for about $65... then again, I've found both of those form factors prone to occasional disappearance, so I can certainly see the appeal of being able to store portable data in my wallet, not to mention the convenience of being able to access that data via their associated applications, even if the computer I'm currently at doesn't have those applications installed.

So I may pick one up at some point. If any of you have already tried one, I'd be curious to hear whether you would consider it a worthwhile purchase. In the meantime, the reason I finally noticed that they've packaged Symphony to run on these devices is that, motivated partly by the comment thread on my last post, I decided to refresh my memory regarding how many clicks it actually does take to download Symphony from its primary location (spoiler: despite already having an IBM ID, the total click count was 13), and noticed the Keepod press release. Intrigued, I checked out the site, and noticed that you don't actually have to own a Keepod to run their portable build of Symphony. After creating an account (which, admittedly, you do have to create in order to download Symphony from their site... but you also have to create one to even place an order for a Keepod, so by the time a device owner would come back to the site to download portable applications, they would already have an account), I went back to the Symphony page on their site, then started counting the clicks it took to actually download the software.

4.

Yes, you read that correctly: it takes more than 3 times as much clicking on a site IBM directly controls to get the software they're giving away for free as it does to obtain a custom distribution of the same free software on a partner's site. Naturally, there's still some teasing going on:

1. The first click is a link labeled "Free Download"... sounds like that's a direct link to the ZIP file, yeah? Nope.
2. Second click is the checkbox indicating acceptance of the license agreement (add an optional click to actually read the license agreement; I didn't... naughty user)
3. Third click is a link labeled "Download". This even has a title attribute of "Download IBM Lotus Symphony 1.3". This will definitely be the ZIP file. Uh... nope.
4. Fourth click is on a link labeled "Download IBM Lotus Symphony 1.3 Now!" (same hover text as the previous link). This must be the real download link. I mean, sure, the very first link had an animated down arrow graphic (this one, to be precise: ), but this one's even bigger, even though it's not animated. And they used an exclamation point in the link text... yeah, I'm sure they mean it this time.

And apparently they did, 'cause that's when the save prompt actually showed up and I finally got to download the ZIP. But even with all that teasing, it never stopped being immediately obvious how to proceed to the next step in the teasing. I didn't have to choose an operating system (maybe because on the Keepod it doesn't matter... or maybe because HTTP request headers tell the server what operating system you use, and some web servers actually pay attention to that), I didn't have to choose a language (maybe they only support English in this build, or maybe they checked the request headers and assume I speak English), and I didn't have to choose between downloading via HTTP or the vendor's proprietary download manager. In other words, despite spending perhaps more time than the average end user manning a laptop, when I got to the real download link, even I was nearing an "ugh, never mind" conclusion... despite the download process being both less tedious and more obvious than IBM's. Which reminded me that the only reason I persevered through the 13-click process when I originally downloaded Symphony was that I'm a Yellowbleeder, and Yellowbleeders know that, if we just push through this sort of thing, good software awaits us on the other side. And we're used to it. The "Facebook Generation", on the whole, is not. Just sayin'.

In any case, I followed their installation instructions (extract the ZIP file, then move the extracted folder to the Keepod), except instead of moving it to a real Keepod, I just moved the folder to an external USB drive. The first time I launched it from the external drive, it popped up a MessageBox saying something like, "Hey, that's not a Keepod!"... and then Symphony opened just fine. After playing for a bit, I closed it. After starting this blog entry, I'd forgotten the wording of that error, so I launched it again to transcribe it word for word... except this time, no error, only Symphony. YMMV, but I'm quite stoked... both that IBM decided to bundle Symphony this way, and that I can run it portably even though I don't own one of those devices. In fact, on second thought, maybe I will get a Keepod after all... it would be rather handy to have my slides in a form I can access from an alternate computer in case this one unexpectedly dies on me at the conference... as long as my co-presenter can still access all of our code demos, of course.

Posted by Tim Tripcony At 12:13 AM Location Home | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category grassroots
Earlier today, Carl Tyler posted about Ninite, a single site to go to for downloading a bunch of applications at once. For example, when setting up a brand new machine, you could check off Firefox, Pidgin, VLC, GIMP, OpenOffice, AVG, 7-Zip, and so on, and then click "Get Installer" and get a single executable that installs everything you need except your fringe applications... for example, for many of you, that includes Domino Designer.

But Designer is now free. And Lotus Symphony has been since its original release. At the bottom of Ninite's home page, they include a form to "Suggest an app". I've already suggested both Designer and Symphony, and am requesting that all of you do the same. Not only would it be quite convenient for us to include those apps in a bulk install the next time we need to outfit a new machine, wouldn't it be great if all of Ninite's visitors saw free Lotus products, treated as true peers to software they've already heard of, offered in a context where those visitors don't have to click through 37 pages on IBM's site just to download the software?

Posted by Tim Tripcony At 12:57 PM Location Canton | Permalink | Comments (15)

Category javascript
Here's a little weekend fun: a while back, word started spreading that Facebook had added an easter egg based on the old Konami code:



Specifically, they added a lens flare effect that only shows up while scrolling, and only after the above keystrokes have been entered in sequence, followed by the Enter key. For those who don't know (and haven't already clicked the link above to find out), this sequence was often used in old Konami video games to unlock something magical (extra lives, invincibility, etc.), and was so widely known that it's wormed its way into numerous other facets of popular culture.

Enabling this in JavaScript is actually easier than you might expect. Here's one possible implementation approach you could add to your own script:

var konami = (function(){
 var sequence = [38, 38, 40, 40, 37, 39, 37, 39, 66, 65, 13];
 var progressIndex = 0;
 var easterEgg = function(){
  /*
   * Replace with your own easter egg code:
   */
  alert("KONAMI'ED!!!");
 };
 return {
  interceptKey: function(thisEvent){
   var keyCode;
   if (window.event) {
    keyCode = thisEvent.keyCode;
   }
   else {
    if (thisEvent.which) {
     keyCode = thisEvent.which;
    }
   }
   if (keyCode == sequence[progressIndex]) {
    progressIndex++;
    if (progressIndex == sequence.length) {
     this.trigger();
    }
   }
   else {
    this.reset();
   }
  },
  reset: function(){
   progressIndex = 0;
  },
  trigger: function(){
   easterEgg();
   this.reset();
  }
 }
}());

Then just bind the interceptKey method to the onkeyup event of whatever element you want to contain the easter egg, e.g.:

<body onkeyup="konami.interceptKey(event)">

NOTE: In case it's not glaringly obvious, this only applies to client JavaScript. For all you XPagers out there, this wouldn't work as a server-side JavaScript function. Not only does SSJS not have a window object, the event model is entirely different from that of browser-based JavaScript.

Posted by Tim Tripcony At 2:56 AM Location Home | Permalink | Comments (5)

Category humor

Posted by Tim Tripcony At 4:03 PM Location Canton | Permalink | Comments (3)