Recently I've been involved in a project with a lot of LotusScript. As a team our approach has been to structure the code according to best practices and leveraging what we've learned from other languages. Standards are always good, but there are always peculiarities that impact what you do. The crucial skill is to be able to work out what is happening when the standard ways don't produce expected results. And most importantly, work out how to work around them.
There are a number of challenges when it comes to two-way REST and Domino. But one of the biggest challenges for manipulation between NotesDateTime objects and JSON is timezone handling. There is an Product Ideas request to provide serialization / deserialization between Domino objects and JSON strings, which surprisingly only has 31 votes, but it's not there yet. So for Volt MX LotusScript Toolkit, this needs handling within the toolkit itself.
Earlier this week Jason Roy Gary announced the Volt MX LotusScript Toolkit. It's important to put some background to manage expectations. There will be an OpenNTF webinar on December 17th where we will explain more about our aims for the project and provide a call-to-arms to the community to join us driving this forward. I encourage everyone to attend if you're interested in using Agents outside the Notes Client or a Form's WebQueryOpen and WebQuerySave methods. But in advance, let's cover some questions I expect people to have.
Part One: Domino and Statistics
Part Two: Prometheus
Part Three: Micrometer and Prometheus
Part Four: Micrometer and Composite Registries
One of the big additions in Domino V10 was statistics publishing, initially focused on New Relic. But as Daniel Nashed showed this can easily be re-routed to other locations, for example a Domino database. When I worked at Intec I tried the New Relic reporting on Domino early on and was very impressed at what was provided. My response wasn't focused on what statistics were delivered - what is outputted is not the important factor, it can easily be change. My opinion came from how easy it was to set up. New Relic itself is straightforward, but what needed to be done on the Domino side was even easier - a few Notes.ini settings, restarting and the statistics flowed. Since the days of Embedded Experiences I have been convinced that ease of implementation is critical for adoption, and adoption is key to value for effort.
Most Domino developers use Windows because that's the only platform Domino Designer runs on. For most of my application development life, my main device has been a Dell laptop of some variety for this reason. For almost a decade now I've also been running a Windows Domino server because Domino Designer local preview is not an effective test environment for a Domino web application. If you're using source control you are also usually testing locally unless you're developing cloud functions. So for development, you typically want a Domino server, and if you're using Domino Designer, the easiest server install to develop against is a Windows Domino server. If you want Linux on Windows and you're using Windows Professional, Docker is a sensible approach, if you take some time to understand port access from Docker.