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I'm going to make an assumption here: the majority of Notes Shops have not upgraded to 8.0.1 yet, and when 8.5 rolls out, they won't be upgrading to that immediately either.

I say that, because I know several companies who are planning to upgrade... but that plan has yet to be executed. So I'm going to assume that the 2 or 3 companies that I'm referring to aren't the only ones out there in the same situation.

I bring this up, because it was suggested by someone that I honestly respect (although I would never let him know that) that this new blogging template should utilize XPages for what I'm looking to do for the content management and delivery architecture.

Now, while I'll agree that XPages rock - I really want the majority of the Notes community to be able to adopt this solution. On the other hand, I want to be able to showcase something that's currently available to the majority of us but that might not be utilized.

So I'm thinking about doing this template all Web Services. Is that something that you use today? I know I don't. And I think that this is the perfect place for it.

So I plan on implementing the Blogger API into this template and adhering to it for all CMS-like functionality - all via Web Services. While I'm not ready at this point to get into all of the reasons why, I really plan on utilizing Web Services (which I'm going to make another assumption and say that we're not all using them in our day-to-day development) to do this as it will showcase an excellent built-in facility that can be found in more than the latest releases of the product, as well as outside of Domino Development.

So, that's the tentative plan - thoughts?

BleedYellow.com Dogears

Weblog (Cont.)

It was brilliant. I had commented a book on yesterday's post topic, and it was the stuff of legend. In it, I explained the following (watered down and from memory):

1. I didn't want to replace documents as the Notes data store, per se.
2. I DID want to implement a translation layer between the UI and the data store, thus separating the data store.
3. This translation layer/data store separation architecture would allow us to maintain individual or multiple documents in external databases, as well as potentially update other data stores. Imagine you fill out a simple form and on submission I'm updating 5 different Notes applications as well as an XML file that's used by an ancilarry technology.
4. The translation layer engine could be written to allow all of the business logic to be defined via configuration documents - allowing not only user control but also allowing us to "skin" like applications.

I mean it was poetry. It was insightful. It was brillaint. IT GOT ATED!

I'm saying that "my dog blog ate my homework brilliantly written comment", and I've had enough. I'm sick of this weblog template - written by yours truly, gang - and this was the last straw!

So I'm going to be writing a new blog template from the ground-up. Ctrl+N and I'm off.

Now, before anyone asks me why I'm not using <enter Domino blog template here>, I'll give you the honest answer. I think that the blog templates are great! They provide people with a quick-to-deploy solution that allows anyone to blog within moments. As a developer though, I cannot tell you HOW INVALUABLE it was to me to write my own. It's purely the development exercises involved in creating a blogging template that I'm interested in - it allows me to keep my skills sharp while integrating 3rd-party technologies and solutions that I honestly wouldn't see in "my day job". That's why I originally wrote my own (although that's not true, when I started this site there wasn't such templates lying around and available - you kids with your baggy pants and new fangled IBM blog templates have it easy... Now get off my lawn!), and that's why I'll continue to writing my own.

So, that being said, is there anything that people would like to see here that isn't already? Co-Comment was one suggestion. Anything else? I'm open to any suggestions at this point... but here's a few things that I'd like to do:

• Co-Comment
• Authenticated Comments - something maybe OpenID-based...
• Polls
• Good ol' Email Notifications/Newsletters
• (maybe) Threaded Comments

Add your request/suggestion onto the pile - and I'll be as public as appropriate (I won't want to bore everyone) with the development effort.

If the surge in both development and adoption of solutions like TwitNotes and the pick-your-poision Instant Messaging clients (GAIM/Pidgin, Trillian, etc.) have taught us anything, it's that people prefer to use their own or preferred entry point into community and collaborative solutions. But what's this mean for the Domino application development community? Well, it tells me that I really need to consider architecting my applications to facilitate BYOUI - or Bring Your Own UI. Now, for corporate applications, you may think that this doesn't apply... but I wholeheartedly disagree! I think that if you really look at it, you'll see just how truly limited the majority of our applications can appear.

Let's take Twitter.com for example. If you were limited to only the website itself to follow and update your and other tweets, how many people do you think would adopt such a thing? Now image if you could only have the reading capabilities, but you needed to log into the website in order to interact - slightly better, but I'll still pass thanks.

With the architecture initially designed to allow ANY chosen client to interact with near-full fidelity, they've given me no choice but to use their service and say thank you!

Now let's hop back into the corporate setting, and say that you have... a corporate travel requests solution. Now, that Lotus Notes client application has all of these do-dads and amazing things that get a person from their cubicle and onto that plane to parts-unknown, but what happens when they want to access that solution via the web? Simple right? We modify the current Design Elements (or the smarter of us create new client-specific Design Elements) and mirror the Lotus Notes client. Now you're cooking with gas!

And what about when the users demand access via their Blackberry? Kinda simple, right? More modifications and more design elements, ahoy!

What about implementation into Portal? What if you needed external travel vendors and agents to access this solution, but only for a subset of functionality? All things you're bound to run into to be honest...

Now imagine that they want a new button, a new function, a new feature - kiss your next month good-bye!

By architecting a solution to maintain it's content both separate from UI and Client Type, we can do away with a lot of that headache. Such a content management engine that is made available to the BYOUI crowd would require a Web Services (or like) mechanism to provide access to the data and functionality.

All this is fine and good, I'm certain that all of you agree... until you understand what that means for Lotus Notes Client Type applications that adopt this architecture. See, moving to a Web Services-like engine for data access goes against everything that IS Lotus Notes Development.

As Notes Developers, we modify "documents", not data. Data is stored in those documents, sure - but we're ultimately modifying an object that contains data.

And that was OK when all anyone ever wanted to do was modify "documents" in a Lotus Notes Client... but today, the demands are different. It's total BYOUI for the employee at home, why can't they work that way in the office?! We can adopt a different development methodology and deliver the same choices from Client Type to Subset of Functionality.... but it's gonna require a change to the way the majority of us think.

I'm babbling here a bit, but with good reason - I think I'm right here, or at least I'm onto something...

As I'm working on a community project (more on that once we get past the initial stages and flesh out some more details, etc.) with an individual that is outside of my organization, I needed a simple solution that would allow me to create and maintain a Project/Task/Sub-Task to do list that we could both work from. Enter bleedyellow.com's Connections Activities.

Now, if I'm any indication of Joe Notes-Guy, I hear of all of these amazing capabilities that are becoming available to use "Notes shops"... but I don't get the chance to really flesh them out. This is one of the reasons that I both jump at chances where I can utilize these new solutions or functionality within established solutions, and why I try to share them with those of you that find yourself in this same situation: life interrupts technology playtime.

It's with that in mind that I bring up Activities, which is absolutely cool. With my 8.0.1 Lotus Notes client, I can turn on the Sidebar Activities application and it's really an afterthought of functionality - it's right there. Makes you wonder if the integrated To Do List would get used today if it was always-on at the UI layer, huh?!

As you can see with these screen caps, I've got the projects and their tasks at my fingertips. With them right there, I can imagine that collaboration with project teams that reside outside of the physical location (or, for this community project, both outside of the location and into a global community!) is going to be MUCH easier - kinda like Tweeting is MUCH easier with the Lotus Notes client Sidebar application TwitNotes.

As for this project that I'm hinting to... unlike Zephyr and Yellowcake (which I'm positioning as low cost community solutions), the goal of this project is to provide not only 2 open source community-accessible solutions, but also do it utilizing ancillary technologies or spanking-new capabilities within Lotus technologies that us Joe Notes-Guys and Gals just don't get that much of a chance to play with - and via a medium which will lend to hectic schedules.

I've been using Twitnotes (currently release 1.0.3) for the past week or more, and a funny thing happened - I kept out of the blogosphere and pretty much out of my Inbox that entire time. Mind you, I really wasn't focused on Twittering all that much, but the Lotus Notes client add-on was in-my-face enough to keep me connected. In fact, my only contact with the outside world last week was through Twitter and the BleedYellow.com and Lotus Greenhouse Sametime environments. Project work (including something with IBM... but I have no idea how much I can get into that stuff here...) has been keeping me very busy at the moment. If you sent an email in the past few days, rest assure that I'm working through the list to get back to you!

At the very least, this might be an interesting study in just how effective a Notes side-bar application can be - despite my schedule I was still able to keep up to speed on the basic ongoings of the members of the Lotus Community (at least those who currently twitter anyways...).

But enough of that, onto the goodies:

Since I was so out-of-touch, I thought I'd make it up to those of you who kindly read my babble. Thus, in case you missed it, I published a new Notes Client Wizard Components application in the Examples & Downloads section of this site. RSS feed readers of this site would have gotten the update, but those of you who navigate to this site may have missed it. It's a few Design Elements that can be used (and modified - it's very vanilla) to create a content creation/maintenance wizard in your Lotus Notes client applications. I may do a formal article on the implementation of such a technique... when I get the time.

Those same website visitors (those who actually still use a web browser client to access this site) may also notice a change in the layout of the content in the right-hand column; I've added a "Contact Information" section as well as my 5 latest tweets. This pushes the "Publications" and "Examples and Downloads" sections down a bit, which I'm not exactly sold on as of yet. Another idea I had of displaying the 5 latest twitters was to create a 2-column layout where the current BleedYellow.com Dogears are today (under the latest Weblog entry on the index.html page), allowing me to display both said Dogears and the 5 latest tweets. The issue with this approach, you lose them once you navigate off of the main page. Mind you, I could have a dedicated webpage to both the Dogears and the Twitter updates... I dunno - feedback appreciated at any rate.

This week, I'll be working on Yellowcake, Zephyr, some other stuff, and hopefully getting a few things completed before the weekend. Here's to hoping anyways... ;-)

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