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Postman: The Crucial Tool for Any Microservice Developer

My history with REST development is long. In 2018, before I joined HCL, I delivered a session "Domino and JavaScript Development Masterclass" at IBM Think. When I posted about my development tools in 2017, Postman - then just a Chrome plugin - was key amongst them. Then in 2020 I posted an overview of Postman. And just as both John and I used Postman as a crucial tool when building the application we showed at our session at IBM Think, it's the tool that should be used by anyone doing anything with microservices - which is what every scope your create for Domino REST API is.

Bali Unit Testing Framework Videos

Two weeks ago four videos were posted on OpenNTF's YouTube channel walking through the functionality of the Bali Unit testing framework. The videos are:

  1. Introduction to Bali Unit Repo: where to find the code and documentation, ask questions etc.
  2. Bali Unit Basic Introduction: the structure of test runner and test suites.
  3. Bali Unit Tests and Assertions: a deep dive into creating tests and the various assertion functions that are available.
  4. Bali Unit Advanced Functionality: custom testers and custom code to run before all tests, before each test, after each test, after all tests.

Andre's Directories Challenge

I am sure that anyone who uses LotusScript has been following the excellent blog posts of Andre Guirard. Recent blog posts on large arrays and queues have been particularly interesting for those of us working on VoltScript. His blog post on a Queue data structure ended with a challenge. The root of the problem is that the LotusScript Dir() function is not recursive. Without a parameter it gives the next file or directory relative to its last call. So you can't have one loop using Dir() and an inner loop that also uses Dir(). Andre uses a Queue class to perform FIFO (First In First Out), which achieves what's needed, but not as required:

LotusScript Variants: EMPTY, NULL, Nothing

One of the great things about working on VoltScript with our team are the regular discussions about the inner workings of the language. Of course it's also nice how easy it is to write and run a test script with the language, to quickly test various scenarios. Recently, because of two separate initiatives we've been working on, the topic of conversation has been Variants, and the potential values that denote a variant without a value.

Negotiating Enhancements

No IT solution is delivered using code written solely by the solution provider. There is always dependent code written by a third party. Dependency management tooling has proliferated in every technology sector to support this. At the language level, this is handled by maven, gradle, npm etc. At the platform level, it’s handled by Homebrew on Mac and various options on Linux. At the DevOps level, it’s handled by Docker, Helm, etc.

And every solution includes an implicit assumption that the dependent code will continue to work as it does and provide whatever the consumer requires. For product offerings, this may be in the form of OEM agreements. For open source, it still exists, whether consumers are willing to admit it to themselves or not.

GitHub Pages Sites on Domino 2: What

Hosting a GitHub Pages - or more properly, Jekyll - site on Domino may not fit everyone's requirements. But it did fit mine. The "how" is relevant for any static website, although there are other options that I'll mention. But this blog post is covering the "what", the technologies involved. There is a lot that will be unfamiliar to many Domino developers, but technologies worth getting familiar with.