July 17, 2009

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Over the past several months, you've heard me mention XPages on more than one occasion. This new technology will pretty much change how you will build Lotus Notes web apps (and soon Notes apps themselves) forever.

What are XPages?

XPages are a new design element within Domino Designer on Eclipse 8.5. This design element is a new way to display data within a Domino web app. It simply separates the design of the page from the data within your application.

What this means is that you can bind various data sources to your XPage. Multiple existing forms and views can be bound to the page. You can then use that data on the page in question. This allows for some very interesting possibilities. For example, you can actually do joins between two views now, something that wasn't exactly possible before.

In addition to the data binding aspects, XPages bring Domino into the Web 2.0 world with ease. There are various controls that you can drop on a page that utilize the Dojo javascript toolkit to Web 2.0 enable all the normal aspects of a web page. Things like date/time pickers, file upload controls, and rich text editing boxes are simply drag-and-drop now. In the past, you could do those things, but in generally took a lot of hacking and javascript coding.

Old default view on the left -- XPages view on right

Also, if you've ever seen a default view from Domino rendered on the web in HTML, you know how ugly it can be. In contrast, surfacing a view through an XPage allows you to make it look a lot more modern. Tabbed tables are the same way, and those allow you to see contents of each tab without a re-load of the page. This makes your application seem a lot snappier to the end-user.

In my day job, I'm more of an administrator than a developer, but that said, I was able to pick up some of the basic XPages stuff without a problem. XPages are very deep however, so you need to dive in and start learning them now.

The XPages Blog

One of the best ways to learn XPages is to hear from experts on the subject. A new group blog just started up that promises to be one of the best resources for XPages tutorials and news on the internet. The XPages Blog ( http://xpagesblog.com ) has contributions from many of the leading voices in the Notes and Domino Community including contributions from instrumental people within IBM.

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