Notes / Domino by Jesse Gallagher
Kicking the Tires on Domino 14 and Java 17 
By Jesse Gallagher | 6/5/23 2:28 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
As promised, HCL launched the beta program for Domino 14 the other day. There's some neat stuff in there, but I still mostly care about the JVM update.
I quickly got to downloading the container image for this to see about making sure my projects work on it, particularly the XPages JEE Support project. As expected, I had a few hoops to jump through. I did some groundwork for this a while back, but there was some more to do. Before I get to some specifics, I'll mention that I put up a beta release of 2.13.0 that gets almost everything working, minus JSP.
Now, on to the notes and tips I've found so far.
XPages JEE 2.12.0: JNoSQL Views and PrimeFaces Support
By Jesse Gallagher | 5/29/23 12:36 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
Last week, I put up version 2.12.0 of the XPages JEE Support project. Beyond the usual fit-and-finish bits here and there, there are two main improvements in this release.
Jakarta NoSQL Views
Jakarta Faces and PrimeFaces
The Loose Roadmap for XPages Jakarta EE Support
By Jesse Gallagher | 5/5/23 1:23 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
At Engage, HCL officially announced Java 17 in Domino 14 (I'm sure they announced other things too, but I have my priorities). This will allow me to do a lot in pretty much all of my projects, but it's particularly pertinent to XPages JEE.
Currently, the project targets generally Jakarta EE 9, which came out in late 2020 and was "just" a switch from javax.* to jakarta.*, with no official new features. However, Jakarta EE 10 came out a year ago - in addition to bringing a raft of new features, it also bumped the minimum Java version to Java 11, pushing it outside of Domino's realm. Accordingly, I've had to hold off on a lot of major- and minor-version bumps in the XPages JEE project as new releases started being compiled for Java 11. Once V14 is out, though, I'll be able to move to the current JEE platform... at least until JEE 11 comes out next year and requires Java 21, anyway.
So I've been working on how I'm going to approach this, and what I'm thinking is that I'll do it in two phases: first, a final 2.x release that provides Java 17/Domino 14 compatibility for existing components, and then a new 3.x breaking-changes release to bring in Jakarta EE 10 components.
In Development: Containerized Builds in NSF ODP
By Jesse Gallagher | 5/2/23 2:04 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
Most of my active development happens macOS-side - I'll periodically use Designer in Windows when necessary, but otherwise I'll jump through a tremendous number of hoops to keep things in the Mac realm. The biggest example of this is the NSF ODP Tooling, born from my annoyance with syncing ODPs in Designer and expanded to add some pleasantries for working with ODPs directly in normal Eclipse.
Over the last few years, though, the process of compiling NSFs on macOS has gotten kind of... melty. Apple's progressive locking-down of traditional native loading mechanisms and the general weirdness of the Notes package and its embedded non-JDK JVM have made things get a little weird. I always end up with a configuration that can work, but it's rough going for sure.
XPages JEE 2.11.0 and the Javadoc Provider
By Jesse Gallagher | 4/21/23 4:11 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
Yesterday, I put two releases up on OpenNTF, and I figure it'd be worth mentioning them here.
The first is a new version of the XPages Jakarta EE Support project. As with the last few, this one is mostly iterative, focusing on consolidation and bug fixes, but it added a couple neat features.
The second one is a new project, the XPages Javadoc Provider. This is a teeny-tiny project, though, not even containing any Java code.
Quick Tip: Stashing Log Files From Domino Testcontainers
By Jesse Gallagher | 3/29/23 3:55 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
I've been doing a little future-proofing in the XPages Jakarta EE project lately and bumped against a common pitfall in my test setup: since I create a fresh Domino Testcontainer with each run, diagnostic information like the XPages log files are destroyed at the end of each test-suite execution.
Moving Relative Date Text Client-Side
By Jesse Gallagher | 3/13/23 3:11 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
One of my main goals in the slow-moving OpenNTF home-page revamp project I'm doing (which I recently moved to a public repo, by the way) is to, like on this blog, keep things extremely simple. There's almost no JavaScript - just Hotwire Turbo so far - and the UI is done with very-low-key JSP pages and tags.
XAgents to Jakarta REST Services
By Jesse Gallagher | 2/6/23 2:03 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Oliver Busse
For a good long time now, XAgents have been one of the common ways to do non-HTML output in an XPages environment - JSON, mostly. I think the technique was codified and the term coined by Stephan Wissel back in 2008 and the idea has been the same since.
Effectively, an XAgent lets you write a Servlet but with a bit more scaffolding. Though XPages has a path to use Servlets officially, that method is more out-of-the-way than XAgents and doesn't (without further hoop jumping) give you some niceties like sessionAsSigner.
XPages Jakarta EE 2.9.0 and Next Steps
By Jesse Gallagher | 11/22/22 4:54 PM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Oliver Busse
Keeping with my productive week off, today I release version 2.9.0 of the XPages Jakarta EE Support project. Similar to the previous release, this one contains new features primarily related to Jakarta NoSQL, but also has some improvements for JSF and a bunch of bug fixes and compatibility improvements.
More Open-Source Updates for Notes/Domino 12.0.2
By Jesse Gallagher | 11/21/22 12:39 PM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
The other day, I talked about some changes/workarounds for Notes/Domino 12.0.2. Today, I made a few updates to some of the open-source projects I maintain, including another update to the generate-domino-update-site Maven plugin.
Notes/Domino 12.0.2 Fallout
By Jesse Gallagher | 11/18/22 5:12 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
Notes and Domino 12.0.2 came out today. Generally, there are some neat features in development and on the server, but there are also a couple things you may run into depending on your workflow and installation type.
The Myriad Idioms For Finding Implementations In Java
By Jesse Gallagher | 10/21/22 7:35 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
A few years ago, I wrote a post about Java service location, which covered things like META-INF/services and OSGI extensions. Today, I'd like to discuss a similar concept: code in a top-level API that finds a specific implementation. For reasons that will become clear shortly, I'll call this the "FactoryFinder pattern".
Upcoming Sessions at CollabSphere 2022
By Jesse Gallagher | 10/11/22 1:09 PM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Oliver Busse
It's CollabSphere time again, and I'm delighted to be involved in a few sessions this time. Since I just very recently did an OpenNTF webinar covering the Jakarta EE Support project, these sessions take the form of roundtables I'm helping lead.
Jakarta NoSQL Driver for Keep
By Jesse Gallagher | 10/10/22 2:24 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
In what has surreptitiously turned into something of a series, I followed up my recent tinkering with Jakarta NoSQL, the AppDev Pack, and Keycloak with doing something similar with Keep.
Keep, like the AppDev Pack's Proton task, provides a remote API for Domino data. It differs from the ADP in a couple notable ways:
Jakarta NoSQL Driver for the AppDev Pack, Part 2
By Jesse Gallagher | 9/27/22 10:00 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
In my last post, I talked about how I implemented a partial Jakarta NoSQL driver using the AppDev Pack as a back end instead of the Notes.jar classes used by the primary implementation. Though the limitations in the ADP mean that it lacks a number of useful features compared to the primary one, it was still an interesting experiment and has the nice side effect of working with essentially any Java app server and Java version 8 or above.
Beyond the Proton API calls, the driver brought up the interesting topic of handling authentication. Proton has three ways of working in this regard:
Anonymous, which is what you might expect based on how that works elsewhere in Domino. This is easy but not particularly useful except in specific circumstances.
Client certificate authentication, where you create a TLS keychain for a given user and associate it with a Directory user (e.g. CN=My Proton App/O=MyOrg), and then your app performs all operations as that user. This is basically like if you ran a remote app with NRPC using a client Notes ID.
Act-as-User, which builds on the above authentication by configuring an OAuth broker service that can hand out OIDC tokens on behalf of named users. This is sort of like server-to-server communication with the "Trusted Servers" config field in the server doc, but different in key ways.
Jakarta NoSQL Driver for the AppDev Pack, Part 1
By Jesse Gallagher | 9/12/22 3:18 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
Though the bulk of the work I've been doing for the XPages Jakarta EE project is to bring JEE technologies to Domino, the NoSQL driver has been designed to lead a double life: it works in an XPages context, but it's written to not have any XPages dependencies. One reason for this is that I want it to be usable if you use, for example, the Open Liberty runtime project to side-car apps on a Domino server but still use Notes.jar for data access.
Another reason for its organization, though, is that I intended for the driver to be portable across implementations. The driver itself is split into a main bundle and a ".lsxbe" implementation bundle. My original thought was to make that ready for a JNX or Domino JNA implementation, but it's pretty flexible.
XPages Jakarta EE In Practice Slides and Video
By Jesse Gallagher | 8/18/22 1:03 PM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Oliver Busse
Earlier today, I presented for OpenNTF's webinar series on the topic of the XPages Jakarta EE Support project. I felt like it went pretty well, and the video and slides are up now.
Adding Transactions to the XPages Jakarta EE Support Project
By Jesse Gallagher | 7/21/22 1:27 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
As my work of going down the list of JEE specs is hitting dwindling returns, I decided to give a shot to implementing the Jakarta Transactions spec.
This one's a little spicy for a couple of reasons, one of which is that it's really a codified implementation of another spec, the X/Open XA standard, which is an old standard for transaction processing. As is often the case, "old" here also means "fiddly", but fortunately it's not too bad for this need.
Another reason is that, unlike with a lot of the specs I've implemented, all of the existing implementations seem a bit too heavyweight for me to adapt. I may look around again later: I could have missed one, and eventually GlassFish's implementation may spin off. In the mean time, I wrote a from-scratch implementation for the XPages JEE project: it doesn't cover everything in the spec, and in particular doesn't support suspend/resume for transactions, but it'll work for normal cases in an NSF.
Adding Concurrency to the XPages Jakarta EE Support Project
By Jesse Gallagher | 7/11/22 12:54 PM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Oliver Busse
For a little while, I've had a task open for me to investigate the Jakarta Concurrency and MP Context Propagation specs, and this weekend I decided to dive into that. While I've shelved the MicroProfile part for now, I was successful in implementing Concurrency, at least for the most part.
Rewriting The OpenNTF Site With Jakarta EE: UI
By Jesse Gallagher | 6/27/22 4:13 PM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Oliver Busse
In what may be the last in this series for a bit, I'll talk about the current approach I'm taking for the UI for the new OpenNTF web site. This post will also tread ground I've covered before, when talking about the Jakarta MVC framework and JSP, but it never hurts to reinforce the pertinent aspects.
Rewriting The OpenNTF Site With Jakarta EE: REST
By Jesse Gallagher | 6/20/22 1:41 PM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Oliver Busse
In deciding how to kick off implementation specifics of my new OpenNTF site project, I had a few options, and none of them perfect. I considered starting with the managed beans via CDI, but most of those are actually either UI support beans or interact primarily with other components. I ended up deciding to talk a bit about the REST services in the app, since those are both an extremely-common task to perform in XPages and one where the JEE project runs laps around what you get by default from Domino.
Rewriting The OpenNTF Site With Jakarta EE, Part 1
By Jesse Gallagher | 6/20/22 2:03 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
The design for the OpenNTF home page has been with us for a little while now and has served us pretty well. It looks good and covers the bases it needs to. However, it's getting a little long in the tooth and, more importantly, doesn't cover some capabilities that we're thinking of adding.
Working Domino Views Into Jakarta NoSQL
By Jesse Gallagher | 6/13/22 1:43 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Oliver Busse
A few versions ago, I added Jakarta NoSQL support to the XPages Jakarta EE Support project. For that, I used DQL and QueryResultsProcessor exclusively, since it's a near-exact match for the way JNoSQL normally goes things and QRP brought the setup into the realm of "good enough for the normal case".
However, as I've been working on a project that puts this to use, the limitations have started to hold me back.
XPages Jakarta EE 2.5.0 And The Looming Java-Version Wall
By Jesse Gallagher | 5/26/22 1:32 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
Earlier today, I published version 2.5.0 of the XPages Jakarta EE Support project. It's mostly a consolidation and bug-fix release, but there are few interesting features and notes about the implementation. Plus, as teased in the post title up there, there's a looming problem for the project.
Putting Eclipse Transformer To Use In Dependency Wrangling
By Jesse Gallagher | 5/24/22 3:28 PM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Oliver Busse
Setting code aside, the backbone of the XPages Jakarta EE Support project is its dependency pool. In it, I use my fork of the p2-maven-plugin to wrangle all the spec and implementation dependencies. Aside from just collecting them, this file does a ton of work to create and reconfigure their OSGi bundle rules to get everything working on Domino.
Poking Around With JavaSapi
By Jesse Gallagher | 5/20/22 3:17 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Oliver Busse
Earlier this morning, Serdar Basegmez and Karsten Lehmann had a chat on Twitter regarding the desire for OAuth on Domino and their recollections of a not-quite-shipped technology from a decade ago going by the name "JSAPI".
Seeing this chat go by reminded me of some stuff I saw when I was researching the Domino HTTP Java entrypoint last year. Specifically, these guys, which have been sitting there since at least 9.0.1
Upcoming Sessions With OpenNTF and at Engage
By Jesse Gallagher | 5/12/22 12:50 PM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Oliver Busse
This month contains a few presentations and sessions of note for me, and I realized I should compile a list.
While I won't personally be attending Engage this year, it's shaping up to be a good conference and OpenNTF and Jakarta EE will be well represented (in chronological order):
So Why Jakarta?
By Jesse Gallagher | 4/28/22 4:56 PM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Oliver Busse
I've spent a lot of time over the last while tinkering with the XPages Jakarta EE Support project in particular and Jakarta technologies in general, and I figured it'd be worth discussing a bit why I like this stack and why I think it's worth putting work into.
There are a couple facets to this, I think. Why is it good on its own? Why is it good as a complement or replacement for XPages? And why is it good compared to the other roads offered for Domino developers?
Structure of the Domino Web App Container
By Jesse Gallagher | 2/26/22 3:30 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Martin Pradny
My fiddling with the XPages Jakarta EE project in recent days has gotten me thinking about this HTTP Service layer again, and I think it'll be interesting to expand how this whole layer works (at least as I understand it). Along with this post, it might be useful to peruse the slide deck for AD105 from LotusSphere 2011. There's a lot of good stuff in there, and basically, nothing has changed in the intervening 11 years.
What To Do With All This XSP Markup? Redux
By Jesse Gallagher | 2/18/22 2:36 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
About a year ago, I wrote a post discussing what I saw as potential future options for all the XPages code we've collectively written over the years. That post was written with the assumption that the future life of an XPages app isn't XPages as it exists today - while that's still a possibility, it's a lot less fun to speculate about.
As it has been for years, this remains on my mind, but my recent addition of JSF to the XPages Jakarta EE project caused it to bubble back to the top of my musings.