At the Ext Conference this week
Should be a very exciting week here in Orlando, FL for the first ever Ext conference. I know that with Domino 8.x a lot of you are jumping on the xpages and dojo bandwagon but you should check out Ext and the work Rich and I are doing with Ext.nd. This week Ext will be unveiling Ext 3 and I'll try and blog about the new features being introduced with this version over the next week or so. Oh, and for our Ext.nd fans, I'll do the same as well so you'll know what's new in Ext.nd Beta 2. In the meantime, poke around our demo on the openNTF.org site. more »
14 April 2009 … 0 - COMMENTS
Ext.nd vs Dojomino at Lotusphere 09
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I'm getting ready myself to head on over to spend the day with some friends but before I leave I wanted to do a quick shot out to everyone and ask for some help. Lance Spellman and I are co-presenting a session at Lotusphere titled: Battle of the IBM Lotus Domino Javascript Toolkits. In this session Lance and I will go through the steps of converting a Notes application into a Rich Internet Application. Lance will use Dojomino, a customized version of Dojo for Domino and I'll be using Ext.nd, a customized version of Ext for Domino (check out our demo to see it in action). So here's where I need your help. What would you like for us to cover? Our presentation is due next Friday with a first draft due this coming Monday so needless to say these next few days and this next week we'll be busy getting things together. So here's your chance. Let us know what you want to see and what you would like to see compared between Dojomino and Ext.nd. Speak now or forever hold your peace! :) more »
27 November 2008 … 11 - COMMENTS
Speaking today at the St. Louis Lotus Technologies Users Group
What will I be talking about? Ext.nd of course. :-) It's basically the same presentation that Rich and I gave at Lotusphere this past January but I'll be showing more demos and walking users through the Tasks application that we covered in THE VIEW article that was recently published. So if you will be in the area around 11:30 today contact Nicole who's email address is on their home page to see if there is room for you to attend. more »
14 October 2008 … 4 - COMMENTS
New Beta release of Ext.nd now available
Beta 1r1 is now available on our release thread of the Ext.nd forum. Please check it out. This version has the categorized view support along with some other enhancements and bug fixes (like being able to search within a category and fixing the grid height issues cutting off the paging toolbar). Check out the demo db on OpenNTF to see the categorized views in action. more »
18 September 2008 … 6 - COMMENTS
IdeaJam LS09 BP session ideas posted
I've posted a couple of session ideas for LS09 over at ideajam. The first is an intro to Ext.nd and would be similar to the session Rich and I did at LS08. The second idea is one that Lance and I have discussed and that would be to take an existing Notes app and web enable it using Dojomino and then again with Ext.nd. In this one session attendees would see how to web enable a Domino application using two of the more popular JavaScript Frameworks: Dojo and Ext JS. So far, looks like more people are interested in the combined Dojo+Ext JS session than they are on an intro to Ext.nd. Maybe an "advanced Ext.nd" session would be of more interest? In any case, go vote and give your comments! more »
12 September 2008 … 2 - COMMENTS
Ext.nd at Lotusphere - who´s interested and what would you like to see?
Last year, Rich Waters and I did a presentation on Ext.nd. Basically, it was about how to quickly get started in using it but didn't get into any advance topics. Last year we also submitted abstracts on covering advanced Ext.nd topics and even an abstract on doing a hands-on session but they weren't picked. We would like to present again at LS 09 but before we submit any abstracts we want to ask you what you would like for us to present on? more »
6 September 2008 … 8 - COMMENTS
Who´s using Ext.nd?
Rich and I are about to release the next beta of Ext.nd which includes support for categorized views and several bug fixes (see the demo app on OpenNTF to see the categorized views in action). I know we have been a bit slow in releasing this release and for the most part, it was ready to be released in June. We have each been extremely busy this summer with work and family issues. We hope you understand and forgive us. But now, the wait is almost over. We'll be releasing the next beta very soon (planned for this week). But I'm curious, how many of you are using Ext.nd and find it useful for your Domino Web development? What kind of enhancements would you like to see? Rich and I have already started the next beta with some new features that I think are simply amazing but tell us, what would you like to see us do? Would you like more work done on the JavaScript API to access the Domino objects? Or do you want us to give you more control of building your own custom UIs instead of using the locked in UI of the DominoUI class? Or would more example apps help? So, let us know if you're using Ext.nd and what you like/dislike and want to see added to the framework. If you're not using Ext.nd let us know that as well so that everyone who stumbles to this blog post can hear of the other options available to Domino Web developers. We know that IBM has worked hard on including support for dojo in 8.x and then there is dojomino that Lance has headed up. Is there any other Domino focused frameworks in the works? more »
25 August 2008 … 13 - COMMENTS
Why isn´t there a NotesDatabase.WebFilePath property?
Maybe it exists in Domino version 8. Anyone know? If it did exist then it would sure make my life a little easier. We ran into an issue recently where NotesDatabase.FilePath returned the full filesystem path for an application we were accessing from a browser using the "Preview In Web Browser" action. If we accessed the application from a Domino server we got back the path relative to the data directory (which is what we want). However, if we accessed the application by using the "Preview In Web Browser" action, we then got back the complete filesystem path (e.g. c:\notes\data\somepath\db.nsf). Ironically, Tommy Valand blogged on this same issue just last week. Unfortunately, we can't use his solution since we aren't processing any documents when we need to get the web file path of a database. Luckily for us in our need for accessing the FilePath method is that we already know the relative path. So, for now, we'll just not use the FilePath property and hope to one day see a WebFilePath property. more »
24 August 2008 … 9 - COMMENTS
Search within a category on the web
Have you ever had the need to search within a category in a Domino web view? By default (at least I can't find any other option), you can't do this with a ?SearchView command. In Ext.nd, we don't use ?SearchView since it doesn't return the data formatted as XML like ?ReadViewEntries does. Therefore, we have our own agent that we call that will do a search and return xml data so we can load it in a nice looking Ext grid. Well, now this search agent will also search WITHIN a category you have your view restricted to. This really comes in handy for our PickList dialog. You can try it out here if you want. Just click the "show picklist using a category" button, and then at the bottom of the dialog, type in your search words and click "search". The search will then be executed but only within the category you are currently viewing. Once we release the next beta of Ext.nd you can try it out in your own apps. more »
28 March 2008 … 1 - COMMENTS
Ext.nd meets categorized views
The next beta release of Ext.nd will include support for categorized views. However, don't get all excited and expect them to work just like categorized views in the Notes client. That is our ultimate goal but for this implementation there will be some limts. These limits are the same limits you see in a view rendered the default way from Domino. First, you can only expand one category at a time. Also, since we currently only support "paging" through views, there will be times that when you expand a category and then go to the next page, you won't be able to see what category was expanded. Hopefully, our next improvement on categorized views will take care of these shortcomings but for now, I'm really pleased with how this turned out. Oh, and if you can't wait for the next release (we still have a few more bugs to fix) and want to see this in action now, just head on over to our demo hosted on OpenNTF. On the outline in the left pane just expand on "View Demos" and then expand "Categorized Views" and from there you'll see many different categorized views setup that we have been testing against. more »
15 March 2008 … 5 - COMMENTS