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.
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.
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.
Since joining HCL Labs my focus for Domino development has been Domino APIs, with Project Keep. Obviously there is little point using a REST API against a Domino database in an XPages application or LotusScript agent. Consequently, application development has been almost exclusively outside of XPages. This has reinforced key differences between Domino development and other application development frameworks. Now was a good time to cover this, particularly following Chris Toohey's excellent blog post "Was XPages a waste of time?". I've always been vocal, that my experience of XPages was not a waste of time. But I'm very much one of those who took a huge step further, and took a lot of time to understand very deeply how XPages worked and how other frameworks were similar or different.
Part One: Domino and Statistics
Part Two: Prometheus
Part Three: Micrometer and Prometheus
Part Four: Micrometer and Composite Registries
In the last part I covered outputting metrics. If you have an existing HTTP server or wish to create a standalone server, it's easy to output the metrics, as shown on the Vert.x samples:
Part One: Domino and Statistics
Part Two: Prometheus
Part Three: Micrometer and Prometheus
Part Four: Micrometer and Composite Registries
In the previous two parts I gave some background on metrics and then described my first pass at coding metrics, quite frankly the hard way. The elephant in the room should be apparent: the metrics output was manually coded for a specific reporting tool.
Part One: Domino and Statistics
Part Two: Prometheus
Part Three: Micrometer and Prometheus
Part Four: Micrometer and Composite Registries
In the last blog post I covered the differences between different statistical reporting tools. I can't speak for Panopta covered in the recent HCL webinar. I suspect they're using "pull" (they install an agent on the Domino server) and I suspect they're using one of the traditional reporting databases (their monitoring covers time periods, so there must be a database; and their offering is based around pre-built dashboards for various products, so no necessity for their USP to build their own reporting repository).
Part One: Domino and Statistics
Part Two: Prometheus
Part Three: Micrometer and Prometheus
Part Four: Micrometer and Composite Registries
One of the big additions in Domino V10 was statistics publishing, initially focused on New Relic. But as Daniel Nashed showed this can easily be re-routed to other locations, for example a Domino database. When I worked at Intec I tried the New Relic reporting on Domino early on and was very impressed at what was provided. My response wasn't focused on what statistics were delivered - what is outputted is not the important factor, it can easily be change. My opinion came from how easy it was to set up. New Relic itself is straightforward, but what needed to be done on the Domino side was even easier - a few Notes.ini settings, restarting and the statistics flowed. Since the days of Embedded Experiences I have been convinced that ease of implementation is critical for adoption, and adoption is key to value for effort.
JUnit testing just makes sense. But writing tests is certainly a skill and your tests can have a big impact on how you structure your code. Sometimes a sensible bit of refactoring can have a large impact, particularly if the code or unit tests were not written in the best way.
It is inevitable that some code will need to interact with a database, and that database will not be available when the unit tests run. There are multiple approaches for handling code that cannot run in a test.
Most Domino developers use Windows because that's the only platform Domino Designer runs on. For most of my application development life, my main device has been a Dell laptop of some variety for this reason. For almost a decade now I've also been running a Windows Domino server because Domino Designer local preview is not an effective test environment for a Domino web application. If you're using source control you are also usually testing locally unless you're developing cloud functions. So for development, you typically want a Domino server, and if you're using Domino Designer, the easiest server install to develop against is a Windows Domino server. If you want Linux on Windows and you're using Windows Professional, Docker is a sensible approach, if you take some time to understand port access from Docker.