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  • in Vert.x
  • 5 min read

Application Development Musings

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.

  • in Vert.x
  • 4 min read

Statistics Publishing and Reporting Part Four: Auto-Configuration and Composite Registries

Part One: Domino and Statistics
Part Two: Prometheus Part Three: Micrometer and Prometheus Part Four: Micrometer and Composite Registries

Easier Endpoints for Single Backends

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:

  • in Vert.x
  • 3 min read

Statistics Publishing and Reporting Part Three: Using Micrometer

Part One: Domino and Statistics
Part Two: Prometheus
Part Three: Micrometer and Prometheus Part Four: Micrometer and Composite Registries

The Easy Way

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.

  • in Vert.x
  • 4 min read

Statistics Publishing and Reporting Part Two: Statistics for Prometheus

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).

  • in Domino
  • 3 min read

Statistics Publishing and Reporting Part One

Part One: Domino and Statistics Part Two: Prometheus
Part Three: Micrometer and Prometheus
Part Four: Micrometer and Composite Registries

Domino V10 and Statistics Publishing

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.

  • in Java
  • 4 min read

Lessons Learned from JUnit and Refactoring

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.

  • in Domino
  • 5 min read

Developing RunJava Addins for Domino

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.

  • in Domino
  • 3 min read

DQL Explorer and Domino

A couple of weeks ago I explained that, even though the UI of DQL Explorer is a React app, the use of DQL is in agents. The two key agents, found within the NSF itself are runDQLExplain and runDQLQuery - the purpose of each should be apparent from the name. But the purpose of this blog post is to outline the interaction points between DQL Explorer and Domino.

  • in Domino
  • 3 min read

DQL: What Is It Good For?

tl;dr - anything you're doing on Domino, but the message doesn't seem to have reached everyone.

DQL has been at the forefront of my radar since Domino V10 over a year ago. If I remember correctly, documentation wasn't immediately available in Domino Designer's Help, but was soon published online. It's been at the heart of sessions and advances ever since. It's often been discussed alongside the app dev pack, which allows Node.js applications to interact with Domino via the proton task. And judging from a couple of discussions in different fora over the last week, it appears the connection between DQL and the app dev pack seems a little too close. It seems to have led some to ignore DQL assuming it's only for Node.js development.