Later this month I will be attending Engage 2024. It will be a bittersweet experience. Engage was the first conference at which I spoke, a session that was way ahead of its time, highlighting the power of repeat controls in XPages and advocating against using View Panels. Ironically, at Engage this year, one of the sessions I'll be delivering has some similarities. But I'll cover the sessions I'm involved in chronologically.
When XPages came to Domino it introduced many Domino developers to Java. Because the IDE was based on Eclipse, it also introduced Domino developers to standard elements of Java development on Eclipse.
Nearly six years ago I delivered a session at IBM Think with John Jardin called "Domino and JavaScript Development MasterClass", a session I also delivered at Engage in May 2018. The session was delivered at the request of Andrew Manby, product manager for Domino. It was shortly after the first Domino Jams when JavaScript development against Domino was a key point of focus and it pre-dated any specific developments to expose Domino for JavaScript development. Now seemed a good point to revisit and review, not only in the context of Domino REST API and Volt MX Go, but also with the future of VoltScript in Volt Foundry.
I do very little XPages these days, I have one application for personal usage that rarely gets updated. But it's when applications rarely get touched that changes elsewhere on the server can have a big impact. I'm going to cover two here, the first raised by a discussion on Discord last week.
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.