Concerning Heart Surgery of my son Simon

Dear All,

The Heart-Surgery of my son Simon went well and was a success. He is now in the first phase of his recovery. We see that Simon has mad good progress during the last 24 hours and we are looking forward to the moment when he can leave the hospital.

Thanks for all your prayers and nice wishes. For us as family its a special time and we feel the presence of God and his love in a very strong way.
Christian

PS: I’m also using this special time for some research project and to study. Stay tuned for more on this.

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Posted by guedebyte on June 11, 2014 in Uncategorized

Automated building and testing of XPages Applications

01 May

You know that situation? You have done a roll out of a new version of an application and a short while after being in production, there is this call from an angry customer? A bug, fixed in a previous release did re appear in the new release!

How annoying is that. And you ask yourself DID THEY NOT TEST IT? So if you walk to the QA department and ask nicely about “Testing”, what answer would you get? I thinks that’s the moment when you start to think about “Automated Testing”. And automated testing, without an automated build of your application is nice, but only the half way!

To collect all the pieces to make this happen was a part of my mission to go to IBM Ireland and meet the XPages Team in Dublin. And a day after 3 days of hard work with them, it’s time to talk about automated build and testing of XPages application. First the story line and pre requirement:

You are working on a XPages Application.
The Application is available as on disk project in a SCM (Source Control Managementsysten)
You have build some selenium UI Tests

Each night or on every change to your application that is commited to the SCM, you want to have a automated build of the application and the selenium tests should run.

Thanks to the Headless Designer (see this Wiki about), you can create with a command line directly a new NSF. But there is more to do then only executing a command line. You want to be sure that the designer has all required plugins (like OpenNTF Essentials) during the build process. And all of this plugins should also be removed after a build. After the build you want to have the application moved to a test server and the selenium tests should be executed against this application. The whole build process is now covered by a maven plugin. You can see the progress on that on this GitHub project.

The headlessdesigner-maven-plugin covers now the following steps:

Installing defined features to the designer
Enabling defined features in the designer
Build the application from on disk project
Disabling defined features in the designer
Uninstalling of the features
Copy the build NSF to the target directory of the maven project

The following steps are planed for the next 2-3 weeks:

Distributing the NSF to the DominoServer
Building a archetype plugin to build per command line a new maven project
Thinking about distribution of the plugins to a official maven repository

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Posted by guedebyte on May 1, 2014 in IBM, Java, OpenNTF, Uncategorized, XPages

Tags: application, automated testing, NSF

What a week – my personal take aways from engage.ug and bccon.de

23 Mar

In fact my week of travels and great meetings started on Wednesday March 12, with 3 Days coaching on customer site in Geneva. Working with customers on a concrete XPages project and guide them to make it first time right is always inspiring. And if there is a Java crack in the project team, you should be well prepared. But its lot of fun and the challenge is to open your ears and learn.

The same is with conferences. I had great meetings with the community. But the best thing was to see how important OpenNTF has become to the community. But there is one thing I want to share. We contributed POI4XPages to OpenNTF because I belive that this project can make the difference. We have become feedback around the globe via mail, but its an incredible feeling, when somebody stand in front of you and says “Thank you for POI4XPages, I use it daily”.

I think the IBM Collaboration Community is something special. Take a look at this great picture from Oliver Heinz (@oliheinz):

Speakers, IBM Champions and IBMers traveling from engage.ug to bccon.de and have a picnic stop. Its raining, it’s wet and cold, but we had a lot of fun! Would you expect this?

But what have I learned on engage.ug and bccon.de:

All want to play with this new child called IBM Mail.next
XPages App Dev is an absolute hot topic in europe! The App Dev sessions where really good visited
Developers are now ready to go to the #free1352 path
We have to work with the Domino Admins that they do understand, why OpenNTF Essentials will not harm their servers

And I cant wait unitl April, to start play with my new project called “Patterns for automated build and testing with Jenkins, Maven and Selenium”

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Posted by guedebyte on March 23, 2014 in Uncategorized

Tags: IBM Collaboration Community, Oliver Heinz

Offense, Defence and Special-Teams – Thats all you need in XPages!

06 Feb

I’m since the movie “Remember the Titans” a fan of football. A game which can only be won when the teamwork is really great. Because of lack opportunities in Switzerland, I enjoy the fact that each time when IBM Connect is, it is also Superbowl time. This time a great defence won over a good offense.

Inspired by an article of Paul Withers http://www.intec.co.uk/back-end-developers-are-from-mars-front-end-developer-are-from-venus/ I try to explain a good XPages Development Team with some Football words. And football fans forgive me, I’m a swiss guy and I will never have any chance to fit the knowledge of any football fan but….

Front-End Developers / UI Developers are the Offense!

They do the brilliant stuff which makes an application shiny and intuitive. They care about the first impression. They are interested in fast response from the backend, and love to do the most of the application logic (not the business logic) in the client. They measure loading time and render time. They are great in visualisation of data and love a clear interface.

Like in football, these guys makes the points!

Back-End Developers are the Defence!

They do the hard work 🙂 because they build the API for the Front-End Developers to process the data. They care about a robust domain-object-model and a stable API. They care about the transactions to the storage and the processing of the processes. They are more interested in brilliant algorithms than any kind of UI representations.

Like in football, they are responsible that you do not lose the ground.

Interfaces, Integration and Connections – The Special-Teams

Most applications are not islands. They are integrated in business processes and depends on other system. Here comes your Special-Teams to the game. You need these guys who have a deeper understanding of the interfaces and can talk with the “guys on the other side”.

Like in football, the Special-Teams can make the difference! The last point you need to win!

In what kind of developing are you good?

PS: Next Time I write maybe about RAD and Fast-Prototyping 😉

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Posted by guedebyte on February 6, 2014 in Java, OpenNTF, SocialBusiness, Software Entwicklung, Uncategorized, XPages

Tags: IBM Connect, Paul Withers, XPages Development Team

IBM Connections – The next AppDev Plattform?

27 Jan

IBM Connections is a great Plattform to bring people centrict data to a single point of storage and processing. Processing this datas with analytics and bring data, people and the work of them into relation is key to have 360 view of your employee, data and processes. But to get this view, you have to attract developers around the globe to develop applications, which use the power of IBM Connections.
But todays developers are not the same, then 5 years before. They have the power and freedom to choose that framework, which matters for them best. Thats one of the reason why we have such a large and brilliant XPages community. They love the things they can do with one of the most advanced java appdev server!
The IBM SocialBusiness Toolkit Team was wise enougth, to know these fact. And they have made the Toolkit available for a lot of different plattforms. I’m very proud that OpenNTF is the Home of the Social Business Toolkit. And the Toolkit is your key to the IBM Connections Plattform.
So join us (OpenNTF) on wednesday 10 am and learn what the Open Source Comminity for Collaboration Solutions can offer you, for your success. We also have a booth on the Solutions Showcase.

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Posted by guedebyte on January 27, 2014 in Domino, Java, OpenNTF, SocialBusiness, Uncategorized, XPages

OpenNTF Essentials deployed in a production enviroment!

10 Dec

Today has the WebGate Development Team done the first rollout of OpenNTF Essentials into a production environment. It’s very cool to see this fast adoption in the own company. And to be honest, I was really surprised by this high pace. The funniest thing was that the information, that OpenNTF Essentials will be installed, came accidentally to me. A short dive into the code shows to me that our team was first using the things that comes from WebGate, but I see on the development stream also the usage of Bootstrap4XPages and first steps into the OpenNTF Domino API.

This shows me, that it is time for a deep dive into OpenNTF Essentials and I’m glad that I can invite you to join us this Thursday, December 12th, at 10:30 A.M. to 12:00 (U.S. Eastern time) on a Webinar held by TLCC and Teamstudio.

The last time, we showed you why, now it’s time for the how.

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Posted by guedebyte on December 10, 2013 in Uncategorized

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