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  • 4 min read

Why Graph?

The bulk of my experience with application development has been building workflow-related rich client and web applications on NoSQL databases, typically IBM Domino. The challenge in the Notes Client was to provide dashboard-style displays and a good way to display documents for action by the current individual. Private views can be used, but impact database performance. So, typically, the approach is to display views that present a scrollable table of data. Domino's document-level reader security is then used to ensure only the appropriate data is visible. If data is archived appropriately, performance of the database is good enough for many reasonably-sized applications. (Of course, archiving is often omitted from scope of the first phase for the rapidly-developed application, and becomes a case of "out of sight, out of mind".) But with the increasing prevalence of web applications replacing Notes Client applications, the ability to display "my documents" and use structured searches to display a targeted subset of documents was much easier.

  • in Vaadin
  • 5 min read

Vaadin

Before I started working with IBM's XPages framework in 2009, I was starting to use AJAX calls in web applications and starting to dig into Dojo charting options for an application. So not unsurprisingly, when I started with XPages I blogged quite a bit about Dojo charts and understandably chose to write the Dojo-related chapter and a half of "XPages Extension Library". I also contributed a Dijit Tooltip custom control and an extension to the Dojo Legend component, to allow more sophisticated formatting of the legend.

  • in Servers
  • 4 min read

IBM Websphere Liberty

IBM Websphere Liberty is a widely-used modern lightweight server (less than 70Mb, I have several running on my PC) that allows modern Java EE development with Java 8. The server is free for development and build server, with limited production use (up to 2Gb of JVM heap space across all instances for the organisation). Web applications are deployed as standard web archives, which means it's easy to download and install demos of various frameworks and easy to use Maven. This is something I've fought with when developing OSGi plugins, because Maven is designed to manage and install dependencies be compilation. On the other hand OSGi best practice is to pull them from other plugins, defined in the MANIFEST.MF. At the very least OSGi needs the plugins adding to the classpath in the MANIFEST.MF. Tycho is designed to bridge the gap between what Maven expects and what OSGi expects, but it's not great. So a standard web application, sucking any jar files in via Maven, makes life a lot easier.

  • in Editorial
  • 10 min read

Thoughts on Domino

The key to any relationship is periodically stepping back and appreciating the good points in contrast to the little annoyances that grate, so that you're not distracted by the first pretty young face (or muscular torso, depending on your predilection) that you encounter. When you thinking it might be time to leave the relationship, that is the most crucial (though most difficult) time to evaluate honestly and dispassionately what you have / had. Because if you don't, sooner or later you'll find different annoyances that grate; or you'll find something you took for granted and absolutely needed is missing from your new love; and before you know it that love too will turn sour and you'll be crying into your alcohol bemoaning wasted years and shattered dreams while looking at a bank account that's been wiped out by periodic divorce settlements.