This week is going to be a big week for the HCL Digital Solutions brands and it started late last night with the announcement of the 2020 crop of HCL Mastershttps://www.cwpcollaboration.com/class_of_2020.html. Congratulations to all who were selected, it continues HCL's commitment to the community and those who go above and beyond to bring benefits to all who use the products.
About a year ago I did a blog post on Domino on Docker, with the intention to follow it up on developing against that Domino Docker server via Notes Client and integrating with it from other Docker containers or outside of Docker. Unfortunately other things got in the way, and it then got put on hold pending the work Thomas Hampel and Daniel Nashed were doing on the IBM repository for Domino on Docker and Roberto Boccadoro's Domino on Docker guide posted on OpenNTF's wiki guides site.
The world of HCL Digital Solutions is evolving rapidly. This brings a lot of excitement but also a lot of challenges. The last certification exams for Domino were in the era of Domino 8.5. Training materials have also languished a lot - official ones from the vendor and from elsewhere, as the ecosystem has contracted. At the same time, the product has diversified and expanded.
After 14 and a half years at Intec, I'm moving on to pastures new. I've learned a lot and developed in ways that were never envisaged by anyone when I started at Intec. I'm very fortunate to have had a company that backed me, and I think we've both benefited greatly. But I've always sought to embrace opportunities and accept responsibilities throughout my career. And now is no different.
Over the years I've spent a lot of time supporting applications. I would like to think I'm pretty effective at it. So I thought it was the right time to share my approaches. The key is a systematic, logical approach to identify the cause - or causes.
Over the years I've done a lot of development on a variety of platforms. Error management is something developers either bake in from the start, add in later, or never get round to! It seems a good time to review my experiences and my philosophy.
tl;dr - it varies.
People discussing Domino application development have been using a new term since early this year - "mid code". This has become necessary because of the evolution of Domino development since Domino V10.
Recently I've been diving back into running Java outside of the Domino HTTP stack, picking up some work I did quite a few years ago playing with Vert.x and Domino based on Stephan Wissel's blog series on Vert.x and Domino. Quite a few things have happened since I was last working on the project, not least the laptop I had at the time got rebuilt, I have got a new laptop, several version of Eclipse have been released and XPages SDK has been deployed to the Eclipse Marketplace (thanks Jesse Gallagher).
One of the themes which crops up from time to time in Domino application development and beyond is the theme of "performance". It's a topic which makes me grit my teeth because of the basic premise. Most articles start from what, for me, is a narrow terms of reference: performance optimisation being about how quick a specific amount of data can be served to a specific environment. My interpretation of the term "performance" is much wider and that is the reason for my scepticism and concern of how people may interpret or use such articles. There are important points raised, but there are also caveats that need to be borne in mind.
Following on from my last blog post it's now time to move on beyond the tooling related to Domino and XPages.