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Index

  • 4 min read

VoltScript - A Unique Opportunity (Paul Withers and Jason Roy Gary)

At Engage 2022 Volt MX Go was announced including features like Volt Formula, a JavaScript-based fusion of Notes formula syntax and Open Formula, and VoltScript, a derivative from LotusScript, and inspired by many modern implementations of BASIC, which will run in Foundry, Volt MX Go's middleware layer. Already at Engage we demonstrated live running code of VoltScript with Try/Catch/Finally, an alternative declaration keyword "Def" for "Dim" and deprecation of GoSub; which let’s be honest is Satan’s spawn. These are the first changes to the core LotusScript language keywords in over 30 years. In addition, we showed live demos of code running triggered from Foundry as well as standalone VoltScript outside of HCL Notes or Domino, for the first time since the end of life of Lotus 1-2-3. We also showed a number of new extensions (LSXs / VSXs) that will obviously be required, as well as developer productivity tooling like unit testing, mocking and a POC of dependency management.

  • 3 min read

LotusScript Profiling

LotusScript agent profiling is not new, but there are still some developers who are not aware of it. It's something I blogged about more than ten years ago. At that time talking about the relative performance of specific API calls, in that case the relative performance of checking .count was greater than zero vs getting the first entry and checking if it was nothing. On other occasions it's also identified mistakes in my code, because it demonstrated more API calls than I expected or needed.

But sometimes it's not a single API call that affects performance, sometimes it's a combination. That's the scenario I came across recently.

  • 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.

  • 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.