I tend to attack the actual development phase of a project the same way most authors work on a manuscript: blast through, getting it on the page (warts and all), just to fill the page. If you can keep the momentum going, slamming through the project, and establish a first draft, you should have the time to revisit the project as a whole and find areas which require revisions.

For example, in the current project that I've been working on... my first pass consisted of me coding to match the user experience established in the project outline and UI wireframes. Once that was finished, I was able to dive back into the code to see where improvements -- functionality, code singularity, and ease-of-maintenance -- could be made.

This project, which unlike the majority of my dayjob projects, I'll actually be able to show you... but until we're finished and for the purposes of this post, the project required that I display both NotesData and external data from various web services and APIs in small, consumable bites...

(Click thru for the complete article and online demo...)

After creating various HTML5 Custom Controls for my IBM XPages application development toolkit, I thought I would showcase two of these controls -- Geolocation and Canvas -- to paint a Google Map of the current user location. Bonus: works great on mobile devices too!

(Click thru for more...)

I'm a big fan of Google Maps, and (when appropriate) I try to integrate them in my applications. They have a knack for giving any app sex appeal. Take a CRM-type application for example. You can supply a user with an address (OfficeStreetAddress, OfficeZip, OfficeCity, OfficeState, OfficeCountry) displayed in a simple table-based layout, or you could display that data and add another row that shows them a hybrid Google Map that plots the given address.

In an attempt to be as efficient as possible when writing XPages applications, I've gotten into the habit of creating simple and reusable Custom Controls that allow me to copy/paste functionality into a given project. My xc:map_static.xsp Custom Control -- which uses the Google Static Maps v2 API -- is a perfect example of one of those reusable Custom Controls.

I'm still making some enhancements to the control, but it's to the point where I'm happy enough with it to show it off:

xc:map_static.xsp Custom Control - Single Marker Demo:
590 Madison Avenue, New York City, New York 10022 US

Online Demo

Google Static Maps API XPages Custom Control Demo

I'll be releasing this Custom Control for download/use at a later date, and will be updating the Demo site frequently... so stay tuned, and let me know if there's anything you'd like to see demo-wise from this control!

During the XPages Markup Ultra Combos article yesterday, I showed a simple HTML5 Video Element Custom Control. While it would have worked as shown, I took into consideration a few things - specifically that you could have more than 2 media types depending on the specific browser (and browser version) you're using - so I redesigned it.

Here's the updated version of an HTML5 Video Element Custom Control...

Click here for the complete article and online demo...

I recently posted an article on how to use the tagName Property of an IBM XPage xp:text Control to create any particular HTML container Element you desire while using the xp:text Value Property to set the childNodes / contents of said container.

From that article:

...I'll discuss another method you can employ to get pretty much any pass thru markup to co-exist with core XPages Controls, which should in turn address any HTML markup delivery need you can imagine.

That method, which we'll discuss in this article, is the combination of SSJS, Expression Language, and any other functional XPage markup passed as Properties and Attributes for your XPages Pass-Thru HTML...

more...