Fullstack | Java | Tech Speaker | Tech Coach | Frank van der Linden
Last Wednesday Meet IT conference was held at IBM Client Center in Milan. I did a session about Cloudant and how you can use it inside an XPages application.
My session was in the Auditorium, a big room like a theater with good chairs, very good audio and screens. Was nice to it such big room.
Yesterday at MeetIT conference in Milan, Amanda Bauman, has announced the IBM Champions for ICS.
I am among the 123 IBM Champions in 2017, and that makes me very happy.
It is the third time after 2013 and 2014, but the first time as an Freelancer.
Thanks to all how nominated me.
Let see what 2017 will bring as an IBM Champion. One great event is already known, speaking at IBM InterConnect.
A special attention for 2 new Dutch IBM Champions, Ronald Dekkers from Acuity and Remco Angioni, my former colleague at e-office.
Yesterday I received an email from the IBM InterConnect 2017 team with the message that my abstract has been accepted.
Wow, was stunned, and happy and a little bit ‘scared’……..
When the news is setting in, I was thinking of the next steps.
I already made the registration, next housing and flights. And of course preparing my slide deck
My session will be about our HR Assistant application we build for the ICS Development Competition, with a deep dive in the code and lessons learned.
Hope to see you in Las Vegas…..
Tonight I thought it would be a good idea to create a special page at my side with links of all my open source projects.
You can find them here or at the bottom of my homepage.
Is the time of the year to have some time to reflect.
Entering the IT
Around 2000 I entered the IT world, first as a Domino Administrator, but after a good talk with a former colleague I made the switch to become a Developer.
So I became Domino Developer and learned Formula language and later Lotusscript. Did some certifications.
When the browser became more important I moved more and more to web development and did some great projects, for example I build the public website of a big insurance company. Was a lot of fun and challenges on such a high traffic website.
Learning Java
Along with these web development projects there was also an increasing amount of Java projects, so I learned Java and did a few nice Java projects. It was really nice to do these Java backend projects, but Front end development was screaming for my attention
XPages
In 2008 IBM introduced XPages, and implementation of JSF. They took 1.1 version and ripped out all the unnecessary parts and added much needed features, which are still not native in the latest greatest version of JSF, like partial refresh. Which the XPages developer took for granted.
I was an early adapter, and despite of the lack of Documentation I liked it. At that time, It was a perfect combination, Java in de the back end, combined with Front end development, like HTML, JS and CSS.
I have build nice solutions.
Going freelance
In 2014 I made the decision to start my own business and became a freelance developer. As a freelancer I followed the money and in the Netherlands there is high demand of Java developer, especially in the enterprise world. So I moved more and more to the JEE world, learned a lot of new tooling, like Maven, Jenkins, JUnit testing and much more…
Most of the applications I build was based on JSF, with a lot of Spring Framework.
Meanwhile there was also time to build more XPages based applications, like the HR Assistant which was our entry of the ICS Development Competition, where we used Cloudant as datastore and IBM Watson to analyse.
I also found some time to learn more of the Salesforce platform, I heard good things about it. I must admit I liked the way Salesforce helping to get new Developers on board, via their Trailhead platform
Full stack
The last months I was looking around to new technology, had a short look at ReactJS. Looks good and very lightweight, the developer descide what should be loaded. Created a very small application.
But now AngularJS 2 has been gone gold, I am learning as much as possible. Took our HR Assistant application as an example and I am busy to rebuild it in AngularJS 2. It is a steep learning curve, but I can get the data from Cloudant, so what could go wrong 😉
Next step
First of January 2017 I will start as full stack Java developer, at a new customer. It will be a very interesting project with lots of new technology like Java, AngularJS, Docker, Salesforce, Websphere Liberty. They are also looking to the cloud, and Bluemix was mentioned.
So interesting times are ahead and I am looking forward to this new step in my career.
Today I did a session at Sutol conference in Prague.
It was about how to get started with Cloudant as an XPages developer.
Today I have added our winning application, HR Assistant, as project at OpenNTF.
I have added the source code in a zip as the release, but I encourage you to go to the Github repository directly.
Included a notice and license file, which is required for every project on OpenNTF.
And last but not least, there are screenshots and….. documentation 😉
Have fun with it. And a demo is in the making.
Yesterday I was helping out Patrick Kwinten with some he had with my Cloudant Connector plugin on Slack. He asked also about the possibility to add or modify Design Documents, I found there foundation was already there.
Design documents can be seen as the schema in your Cloudant database, which specify what is in the view and how the ftSearch index is build.
Below is an example of a Design Document. As everything in Cloudant the syntax is JSON.
[dropshadowbox align=”none” effect=”lifted-both” width=”auto” height=”” background_color=”#ffffff” border_width=”1″ border_color=”#dddddd” ]
[/dropshadowbox]
As I wrote before, the foundation was already laid in the plugin, the only I had to do was to expose them to the outside world. With this new methods you can programmatically create or update Design Documents.
updates, map of updates, where the value of the map is the javascript of the selection designDocument:
updates.put("newUpdateHandler", "function (doc, req) { ... }");
the name of the designDocument to create or update
Everything, including an updated ReadMe is in the BitBucket repository.
Thanks to Patrick for the great blogpost with boilerplate, where you can see the plugin in action.
When you need help with the plugin, let me know or reach out to me on Slack as Patrick did.
When you have feature request, please create an issue in the BitBucket Repository and I will have look if it will make it to the plugin.
Yesterday I received an email that my session has been accepted for the upcoming Sutol Conference in Prague.
It is the first time I will be at SUTOL, so I am looking forward to it. I heard some very good things about this conference.
Hope to see you in Prague next month, may be we can go for a short run through the city. ( The best way, in my opinion, to explore a city ;-))
I will be speaking at MeetIT, formerly known as DominoPoint Days, in Milan. Looking forward to return to Milan for this great event after a few years.
My session will be about Cloudant, what else 😉
A (XPages) developers guide to Cloudant
NoSQL databases getting more popular recently, especially MongoDb. But there is another popular NoSQL, Cloudant. It is the cloud version of CouchDb. Cloudant has lots of similarities with good old NSF, but a lot faster.
We have build a web based application which stores it data in Cloudant and use the XPages runtime to display the data.
I want to share my experiences when developing this application, by setting up the Cloudant database, add search indexes, perform the common CRUD operations, search for specific data. I will also show more about my Cloudant connector OSGi plugin which is used heavily in this project.
In the end you will only use the XPages/Java design elements in the NSF for the Front end.