Hacks are ugly, they are unsupported, and they are often totally necessary in IBM Lotus Notes Domino Web Application development! I thought that I'd take the time to discuss several of those hacks -- required for B.XP. LND App Development -- that can get you the desired functionality for your applications and the desired user experience your customers demand!

While IBM Lotus Notes Domino's Rapid Application Development techniques are both amazing for quick-to-create collaborative business solutions and (let's say) well intended, it's HTML Form Element-generation for any Form Design Element can be extremely frustrating.

What's the big deal?! you may ask - if you're creating a Form Design Element, chances are you're using it to Create, Read, or Update a NotesDocument. The problem with IBM Lotus Notes Domino's RAD auto-generation of the HTML Form Element is when you're not using the Form Design Element for NotesDocument CRUD, but rather for the rendering of the overall NotesDatabase Domino Web Application User Interface.

And if you're still asking What's the big deal?!... then consider this: since HTML Form Elements can not be nested, that single HTML Form Element must contain every individual HTML Form-like function in your dashboard.

Let's take a look at an example dashboard-style UI...

(Click thru to read more...)

So easy, even an IBM Lotus Notes Domino Web Application Developer could do it! With Tim Tripcony and Nathan T Freeman on the assist, I've added TinyEditor, a XHTML-generating JavaScript WYSIWYG editor to the Comment Form for this site.

It was pretty simple really... just ran into two issues (hence the need for the assists - I couldn't see the forest from the trees today):

(Click thru for more...)

It worked fine in Firefox, which is equipped with both Firebug and the Web Developer Toolkit, so no help there. It even worked in Internet Explorer 6, but I couldn't get it to work in IE7! I spent far too long (more time than I'm willing to admit) trying to find out why the actionbar for a rather complicated XHTML Form (complete with content-sensitive hide-whens, JSON-driven UI data pickers, interactive field-level validation, etc.) would become deactivated if I selected one - and specifically one - of the Tabbed Table tabs.

(Click thru for more...)

I've made it no secret that the blog template that I use relies on my hand-writing the HTML markup that you see in each post. Sure, I could go with a WYSIWYG editor, but I really think that writing out the markup by hand keeps me more up-to-speed on coding for the web.

The only problem that I run into - and it's not really a problem as much as it's an annoyance - is when I need to display markup within a post. See, if I want to display a <, I need to write &lt;.

This makes the following line:

<h1><span class="greeting">Hello<span> <span class="location">World</span><span class="punctuation">!</span></h1>

this:

<h1><span class="greeting">Hello<span> <span class="location">World</span><span class="punctuation">!</span></h1>

Now, to do this, I typically open a new Notepad instance, write out the code, then run a series of Find & Replaces until I get the publish-ready markup, which I then paste back into my blog post.

After installing the Lotus Notes 8.5.1 Client, and with it's improvements on the Lotus Notes Client Sidebar Widget handling of Google Gadgets, I found a different - and much preferred - approach: Donato Furlani's Post-Code code converter.

And this Google Gagdet now sits as a sidebar widget in my Lotus Notes Client sidebar, just waiting for me to have to write out some XHTML that I need blog post-ready... which based on a few things that I have coming up, this will really come in handy!

Feel free to download and add this Sidebar widget into your Lotus Notes Client Sidebar!

David does a great job with the second installment of his absolutely awesome ongoing series Notes in Nine. In this episode, he demystifies the Rip & Replace approach that is often associated with using XPage in Domino Web Application Development.

David creates a very simple yet effective XPages-based UI for a pre-existing NotesDatabase, and showcases how you can rather quickly improve your customer's usage experience without needed to re-invent your existing Lotus Notes/Domino applications.

For more information, check out David's Notes in Nine - Episode 2 - Busting the Rip and Replace Myth post on his site!