Ramble On

From my personal perspective the big feature in 8.5 is XPages, but 8.5 is not a one trick pony. There have been a number of other improvements, such as the ID Vault (something not applicable in our institution) and Domino Attachment and Object Service (DAOS).

DAOS

DAOS is described elsewhere. But basically, DAOS allows you to store the attachments in your Domino databases outside of the database, reducing the size of the nsf. 

Big figures are being thrown around; reducing storage size by 40-60%, removal of duplicate attachments and DAOS invisible to Domino apps

DAOS can be enabled per-database or across the entire server and it’s possible to undo the change at a later stage, which is excellent news. Also since it’s implemented at the API level, it’s invisible to the end user or developer.

Reflecting on our system, DAOS  offers:

• Quicker backups. DAOS are stored as files on the file system so can be incrementally backed up.
• NSF are smaller. Since these are loaded into the server’s cache for web delivery, this means more apps can stay resident in memory and so less disk IO.
• We create 4000 modules (databases) per year and carry across teaching resources from previous years. Often resources are uploaded as attachments, and don’t change year on year, so we should see another significant space saving

Other 8.5 features and benefits

• 8.5 contains 400 bug fixes to the nsf
• 50% reduction in CPU for transaction logging
• ID Vault (easier password change)
• Domino configuration tuner for identifying performance issues with your Domino setup. This will be updated as and when, rather than being tied to a Domino release, another positive step from Lotus. 

Developments post 8.5

There will finally be a new Eclipse based lotuscript editor release with 8.5.1

Further ahead the team are investigating how XPages can consume SOAP, REST, and XML (data sources). New controls for XPages such as menu bar, toolbar, outline and general performance improvements.

They are also working on directory independence such as using user info from ldap or active directory to improve single sign-on

Domino, XPages Domino, Domino 8.5, XPages

This is the biggie for us web developers. This is the first session on the technology at this year’s Lotusphere. It’s definitely popular, and hence very warm.

The session was ran by Maureen Layman and a newbie Maire Kehoe and demonstrtedb(live) many of the new XPage features in Designer 8.5. Maire was clearly nevous but did pretty well.

Most of the stuff was basic stuff. I’ve not looked at themes or localisation yet and I wasn’t aware of the server side inline errors (though configuring them didn’t seem to be obvious), so I got something out of the session.

Unfortunately, as expected, nothing was mentioned about accessibility.

Hopefully by the end of the week, i’ll see some good examples of how developers have used XPages.

Domino, Lotusphere, XPages

I thought I’d document over the next few months my baby steps in learning XPages. Although I won’t be using XPages for any development in the short to medium term, I’m going to start to investigate the accessibility implications of each option before developing anything in anger.

My first step – and it really is a first step almost embarrassing step, was to simply add html to my page so that I can develop pages with a semantic structure. Stop laughing at the back. We all have to start somewhere.

The Designer client offers some simple tools to style on-screen text

Don’t use them. The html this toolbar produces uses inline styles rather than standard html and explains why the discussion template’s html seems to be missing any form of structure.

Using the bold face option adds

<span style="font-weight:bold">Bold text</span>

The italic and underline also generate inline styles. So using these options could bloat your code considerably.

The increase and decrease font size option also generates in-line styles:

<span style="font-size:14pt">14 pt text<span>


As you can see, it also uses ‘points’ as the default unit rather than pixels or ems, a unit I’ve avoided because it renders differently across browsers. So another reason to avoid this edit bar.

As far as I can see, there doesn’t appear to be an option to set headings and paragraphs, or to insert rules and lists. So how do you add them?

One option appears to be to use the ‘computed field’ option and to set the ‘content type’ to html and for the ‘value’ to use the javascript return function to return html. For example

return ("<h4>This is the header</h4>")

This seems to be a too long winded for my liking so the other alternative seems to be to switch to ‘source’ view and to manually add the html directly in the source view. I have to admit, I’m surprised that there isn’t an WYSIWYG tools to help you produce a page with any form of semantic structure.

One word of warning. It appears 8.5 continues Domino’s habit of generating BRs for every carriage return.

Domino, XPages Domino 8.5, XPages

I wonder why it is that many believe Notes is dead?  Compare and contrast two recent announcements from IBM and Apple

Notes/Domino 8.5 release

(There is a little link in the news banner in the centre of the screen to a press release about Notes on the Mac)

iLife ’09

On Apple’s site, there are loads of videos and information telling us why iLife ’09 is worth upgrading to. On the IBM site we get

If I hadn’t been to Lotusphere 2008 and didn’t follow the Lotus related blogs, would this page really convince me that Notes 8.5 is a fantastic product?

Apple, Domino

…. confusing! I’m sure it will make sense once I start to use it. 

Had a brief look at the 8.5 discussion template and it appears all that all link properties are blank so no effort has been made to generate alternative views when Javascript is unavailable. Bad design. 

I’m not sure when I’ll be able to use XPages in anger. Our learning environment has 22,000 users with 14,000 individuals logging in daily. It’s completely web based – no Notes clients, and with the environment heavily used in teaching, we have to ensure the software is reliable before upgrading. We’ve experienced reliability issues with Domino on Solaris pre X.02/X.52 release so we tend to wait for these releases. We’re also are limited to making big system upgrades to the month of August. So it may even be 2010 before I see 8.5 live on our systems. Let’s hope 8.5 proves to be reliable and we can go sooner.

Domino Domino, Web Design

Ok, now this is beyond a joke. Sorry, but Domino 8.5 is going to be an accessibility nightmare. I know the discussion template is used many many companies and I’ve seen some University’s base their discussion facilities on this template (not us, we wrote our own), but the new template makes NO ATTEMPT to be accessible, both from point of view of handling javascript or by using semantic HTML.

Sean Cull has kindly left his 8.5 discussion template  open for us to play with.

If you’ve got Firefox with the web developer tool bar installed. Switch off css

Notice how the page just collapses into a mess. None of the generally accepted conventions for semantic pages have been obeyed (such as marking up related links as lists).

It’s even worse if you switch off javascript. Although many of the advanced screen readers such as JAWS, integrate with Internet Explorer and deal with certain types of Javascript events, it’s generally accepted in accessibility circles that wherever possible, web developers should attempt to make as much of the page work without javascript as possible. In fact nothing in the discussion template works without javascript. All the links are to ‘#’ with the clicks being handled through events. Why, when there’s a document stored in the database is it now possible to show the document when javascript is switched off.

If the template demonstrated significant usability improvements over the existing template it would almost be acceptable, but the template is very basic. Where’s the different view modes such as viewing discussions as linear threads or the ability to filter discussions to the current conversation (i.e. limiting the view to the direct reply hierarchy). Where’s the facility to view the message you’re writing your reply to? Where’s the lookup when tags are added?

A core template such as this, should be accessible. If I was evaluating this product for use within the University it would not make it past the tender. It would fail on every accessibility point.  Sorry, it’s simply that bad.

Domino, Web Design Accessiblity, Domino, Lotusphere 2008, Web Design

Lotusphere online has been available for several days. Although I’ve still not been sent an email informing me that it’s live (just like last year), unlike last year my email and confirmation number work. 

A number of features are created using XPage technology and this is the first application I’ve seen that uses this functionality. I’ve mentioned that I’m concerned that XPages will provide Domino designers with tools that they might use that caused them to embed an accessibility time-bomb into their company’s intranets. So I thought I’d take a brief look at how accessible this IBM site is and knocked up a quick video walk through.

Domino, Lotusphere Accessiblity, Domino, Interface, Web Design