My photos from Lotusphere have already been added to the Lotusphere flickr group, ( as p_a_h) but I’ve just uploaded a bunch of Lotusphere related videos to Youtube:
All videos except ‘Mustang Sally’, were created with the new iMovie ’09. I installed it earlier today and as you can see it’s very easy to use and my first impressions are that it’s a big improvement over ’08. If you’ve a Mac user who plays with video, but not seriously enough to warrant Final Cut, it’s definitely worth upgrading to.
Posted in Apple, Lotusphere
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
Posted in Domino, 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.
Posted in Domino, Lotusphere, XPages
