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  • in Docker
  • 4 min read

Rancher Desktop, A New Dev Tool

Docker has been a significant development tool for me for some time. The ease of spinning up a clean, standalone development environment for applications is a great benefit. The ability to switch seamlessly between different versions is a big benefit when testing. Another benefit is the ability to create demo environments for conference sessions and share them via GitHub for others to easily deploy samples.

But when Docker announced new licensing terms last year, it shook up the desktop development landscape. Rancher, who have a long history of expertise with Kubernetes, stepped into the desktop game by announcing Rancher Desktop. I was aware of the open source project last year, but when Daniel Nashed pointed out to me that 1.0 had recently been released, I decided it was time to give it a try.

  • in Java
  • 4 min read

Docker, Java and Processes

Whether it's Docker or Kubernetes (or some flavour thereof), running microservices in containers is a powerful option. It can make it easy to deploy development or test systems, ensuring consistency across your development team. But when you move from consuming to building, particularly when you're building less out-of-the-box containers, there are some deeper elements that you need to be aware of.

  • in Domino
  • 2 min read

LotusScript Declarations

How can you get a "Type Mismatch" error in a Forall loop in LotusScript?

This was the question a few of us hit with a recent bit of coding. You can't declare the forall variable, and if you're iterating over a variant containing only strings, surely this shouldn't happen. The loop was quite basic:

  • in Domino
  • 2 min read

Goodbye Nathan

Over the weekend we lost another long-standing member of the Domino community, Nathan T Freeman. Nathan was outgoing, often controversial, but passionate about open source and helping others. Everyone who met him will have stories about him. But I know he is one of the individuals I have to thank for being where I am today.

  • in Domino
  • 2 min read

Adventures in CacheLand 2

In my last blog post I talked about challenges we had to overcome as a team with regard to caching of constants. But a bigger challenge we hit was caching of design elements.

Part of the solution we built required copying design elements from one database to another. Part of the beauty of Domino is that everything is a Note - including design elements. Design elements are just Notes with a special flag. So just as you can copy a document from one database to another by getting a handle on the note, you can also copy a design element from one database to another by getting a handle on the design note. The API is exactly the same - Call NotesDocument.copyToDatabase(targetDb).

  • in Domino
  • 2 min read

Adventures in CacheLand 1

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.

  • in Domino
  • 5 min read

Domino Timezones

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.

  • in Domino
  • 4 min read

Volt MX LotusScript Toolkit

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.

  • in Testing
  • 4 min read

Getting the Most out of Postman

Postman Tests

If you're developing an API, the best tool to test with is Postman. When I initially used Postman, I only used it for basic individual tests. If you followed my blog at Intec, that also led me to recommend and to use Node-RED for creating a test flow. However, over the last few months I've learned about significantly more functionality of Postman, which starts to become extremely relevant when using Postman collections for other purposes.