Recent by Jesse Gallagher 

Data Access With XPages JEE  

By Jesse Gallagher | 1/17/25, 6:25 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Though one day I'd really like to sit down and work on expanding and categorizing the documentation for the XPages JEE project, in the mean time I can at least put together some scattered info in the form of blog posts, webinars, and example apps. Add this post to the pile! Some of it will be a rehash of previous posts, but it doesn't hurt to see it rephrased.

New Release: XPages Jakarta EE 3.3.0  

By Jesse Gallagher | 12/23/24, 1:57 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

As part of finishing my holiday gift shopping, I published version 3.3.0 of the XPages Jakarta EE project today. This release contains a number of bug fixes to do with asynchronous and scheduled tasks based on some edge-case and intermittent trouble I ran into while developing some apps with it. Additionally, it has some consistency fixes for the Jakarta NoSQL support - in particular, it improves mapping of object properties to columns, matching the item names case-insensitively and matching special fields like FIELD_CDATE to matching columns with formulas like @Created.

PSA: XPages CSS Changes in 14.0 FP3  

By Jesse Gallagher | 12/17/24, 2:52 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Fix Pack 3 for Domino 14.0 came out last week and, in addition to the usual spate of fixes you'd expect from an FP, it brought a potentially-significant and -breaking change to the way XPages handles style attributes for components. This is presumably in the interest of supporting the pathological strictures of Content-Security-Policy, but it applies whether or not you have taken any other steps to implement CSP. The specific change is that the XPages renderers will now take the style attribute, externalize it to a class, and then make a <style> block for it.

Using Custom DNS Configurations With CertMgr  

By Jesse Gallagher | 10/25/24, 3:10 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

The most common way that I expect people use Domino's CertMgr/certstore.nsf is to use Let's Encrypt with the default HTTP-based validation. This is very common in other products too and usually works great, but there are cases when it's not what you want. I hit two recently. Domino's CertMgr can handle those DNS challenges just fine, though, and the HCL-TECH-SOFTWARE/domino-cert-manager project on GitHub contains configuration documents for several common providers/protocols. For historical reasons (namely: I didn't like Network Solutions in 2000), I use joker.com as my registrar, and they're not in the default list. Indeed, it seems like their support for this process is very much a "oh geez, everyone's asking us for this, so let's hack something together" sort of thing. Fortunately, the configuration docs are adaptable with formula (and other methods) - I'll spare you the troubleshooting details and get to the specifics.

Recent Open-Source Project Updates  

By Jesse Gallagher | 9/7/24, 10:01 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

I've released a spate of open-source project updates recently, and I figured it'd be good to round up what's new. Most of them are utilitarian in nature - mostly fixes for things that crop up with Domino 14 and Java > 8 - but the first one is larger.

Pretty-Printing JSON in the (Desktop) Notes Client and Domino  

By Jesse Gallagher | 7/29/24, 3:21 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

In the OpenNTF Discord (join if you haven't!), Daniel Nashed brought up a task he was facing: in the Notes client, writing pretty-printed JSON. LotusScript has its NotesJSON* classes that can process JSON in their stark way, but the stringify output is meant for machine reading and doesn't include whitespace and line breaks, making it ill-suited for things like configuration files or other things a human might read or edit. Since the goal is to get it working in the full Notes client and not Nomad, Java is on the table, but Java - for dumb historical reasons - has no proper built-in JSON library. However, as of 12.something HCL shunted IBM Commons down to the global classpath in order to support the "share Java design elements between XPages and agents" feature. Among many other things, IBM Commons includes a JSON library that can suit. I wrote a post almost a decade ago talking about this library and its limited nature, but it's nonetheless less limited than the LotusScript classes, and it's up to the task. There are a couple ways to go about this, depending on your needs, but for now I'll just cover the basic case here of "I have a string of JSON and want to format it".

XPages JEE 3.0  

By Jesse Gallagher | 6/10/24, 1:29 PM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Today, I uploaded the release version of 3.0.0 of the XPages Jakarta EE Support project. It's been proving stable in my use since the last beta, and so I think this is as good a time as any to release it properly.

XPages JEE 3.0 Beta 4  

By Jesse Gallagher | 5/23/24, 10:43 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Earlier today, I uploaded beta 4 of XPages JEE 3.0 to GitHub. I've been taking a slow approach to this release due to its "breaking changes" nature, but I think it's just about ready for release. Domino 14 Like previous betas, this release requires Domino 14 (and Notes 14 for development), since it moves to a baseline of Jakarta EE 10, which in turn requires Java 11. Doing this let me get rid of some extra shim code that was needed to support both Domino 14 and previous versions, and also let me move to some newer language constructs. If you're interested in the sorts of things that the new versions of Java brought, check out the OpenNTF webinar from April, where I talked about just that.

Simplifying the Maven Build of the NSF File Server Project  

By Jesse Gallagher | 4/11/24, 5:13 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

When working on NSF File Server project that I talked about the other day, I took a slightly-different tack as far as building it than I did in the past, and I think it's worth going over some of that in case it's useful for others.

NSF File Server 2.0  

By Jesse Gallagher | 4/8/24, 12:49 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

A few years ago, I made a little project that hosts an SFTP server that stores documents in an NSF. I've used it here and there since then - as in the original post, I stashed some company docs in it to have them nicely synced among our Domino servers, and I've also had cases where clients use it to, for example, provide a way for their vendors to upload files in a standard way. The other week, I decided to dive back into it to add some capabilities I'd wanted for a while, and the result is version 2.0.0. This version is a significant revamp that adds quite a bit.

Adding Code Coverage Reports To Domino-Container-Run Tests  

By Jesse Gallagher | 3/12/24, 2:08 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

When you're writing test suites for your code, it can be very useful to use a tool to analyze the code coverage of your tests. While people can get a little obsessive about coverage percents, there's certainly no denying that it's helpful to know how much of your code is actually run when testing, and also being able to look down into the specifics of what is covered.

XPages JEE 2.15.0 and Plans for JEE 10 and 11  

By Jesse Gallagher | 2/22/24, 1:09 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Today, I released version 2.15.0 of the XPages Jakarta EE project. As is often the case lately, this version contains bug fixes but also a few notable features: You can now specify Servlets in WEB-INF/web.xml (as opposed to just via the @WebServlet annotation. This is helpful for defining a Servlet when the actual implementation is in a JAR or when following non-annotation-based examples You can now specify context-param values in WEB-INF/web.xml in the NSF and META-INF/web-fragment.xml in JAR design elements, which will be available to JSP, JSF, JAX-RS, @WebServlet-annotated Servlets, and web.xml-defined Servlets Added @BooleanStorage annotation for NoSQL entities to define how boolean values are converted to note items Added CRUD operations for calendar events to NoSQL, around a few new methods on Repository. This exposes some of the capabilities of NotesCalendar and can be used for, for example, providing an iCalendar feed based on a mail database. To go with that, XPages JEE also re-exports iCal4J as included in the Domino stack for NSF use, though this API is... not smooth The first two here are focused around bringing NSFs more in line with "normal" Jakarta EE applications, while the latter are some nice improvements for the NoSQL driver. I hope to put the last one in particular to good use - for example, OpenNTF's site will be able to provide a calendar of webinars and other events that we can manage internally using a normal Notes calendar, and that sounds nice to me.

Notes/Domino 14 Fallout  

By Jesse Gallagher | 12/18/23, 3:31 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Notes and Domino 14 are out now and, as I discussed back in June the big deal for me is the move to Java 17. This also came with a refresh of the Eclipse innards, from Neon (circa 2016) to 2021-12 (circa, uh, 2021). The Eclipse update is welcome, but so far it's been less impactful than the Java update - at some point, I'll want to see if some of the current-era Eclipse plugins work here, but that's for the future. In the mean time, there's a bunch to know, so let's get to it! I've broken this one down into "critical" and "less critical" sections, since this post will likely have a similar life to my target platform one.

XPages JEE 2.14.0  

By Jesse Gallagher | 10/28/23, 4:39 PM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Oliver Busse

Today, I released version 2.14.0 of the XPages Jakarta EE Support project. As with the last few releases, this is primarily about bug fixes and compatibility as I prepare for the big switch in 3.0, but there are some notable, if small, feature additions.

New Tiny Project: Wink Chattiness Patch  

By Jesse Gallagher | 9/19/23, 3:38 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

I've been using the Domino 14 betas for development for a while now, and one of the things that has driven me a little nuts is the way Wink spews a bunch of INFO-level logs to the server console when the XPages runtime initializes. You've probably seen it - this stuff: It goes on for a while like that. This isn't new with 14 as such - it's just that 14 now ships with Verse by default, and Verse uses the Wink distribution that came along with the Extension Library, and so now everyone sees this.

XPages JEE 2.13.0  

By Jesse Gallagher | 7/24/23, 12:53 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Today, I released version 2.13.0 of the XPages Jakarta EE Support project. Though there's not a single big banner feature, this one brings a number of good enhancements in a bunch of areas.

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.

Dipping My Feet Into DKIM and DMARC  

By Jesse Gallagher | 4/11/23, 3:19 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

For a very long time now, I've had my mail set up in a grandfathered-in free Google Whatever-It's-Called-Now account, which, despite its creepiness, serves me well. It's readily supported by everything and it takes almost all of the mail-hosting hassle out of my hands. Not all of the hassle, though, and over the past couple weeks I decided that I should look into configuring DKIM and DMARC, first for my personal mail and (if it doesn't blow up) for my company mail. I had set up SPF a couple years back, and I figured it was high time to finish the rest. As with any admin-related post, keep in mind that I'm just tinkering with this stuff. I Am Not A Lawyer, and so forth.

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.

Overdue PSA: Reverse-Proxy Headers in Domino 12.0.1FP1 and Newer  

By Jesse Gallagher | 1/25/23, 11:19 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Oliver Busse

Just over a year ago now, I wrote a blog post describing the sudden removal of my beloved HTTPEnableConnectorHeaders notes.ini parameter in the 12.0.1 release. However, during the administration-focused OpenNTF Repair Café today, I was reminded that I never modified that post or made a followup to detail the changes since then. I plan to remedy that here!

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.

Tinkering with Mastodon, Keycloak, and Domino  

By Jesse Gallagher | 11/11/22, 4:00 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Because of what I'll euphemistically call the current historical moment on Twitter, I (like a lot of people) decided to give another look at Mastodon. The normal way one would use it would be to sign up at mastodon.social and be on one's merry way, treating it just like a slightly-different Twitter. However, Mastodon is intentionally designed to be federated in a way similar to email, and the software is available on GitHub complete with scripts for Docker Compose, Vagrant, and so forth. So I went and did that, setting up my currently-barely-used account at @jesse@pub.frostillic.us. That on its own isn't particularly notable, nor are the specifics of how I set it up (it was a hodgepodge of a couple posts you can find by looking for "mastodon docker compose"). What I found neat for our purposes here was the way I could piggyback authentication onto stuff I had recently done with Keycloak. Keycloak, incidentally, was the topic of today's OpenNTF webinar, so, if you didn't see it, check back there for the replay when it's posted.