My comments

HCL Notes/Domino 8.5 Forum (includes Notes Traveler)

Subject:

My comments

Hi Panu,

Here are my comments.

Overall though, yes XPages are a big change, but they are a positive step.

1. Reuse of what we've done before. I've built a large repository of reusable LotusScript libraries, subforms and agents. NONE of these can be used with XPages and IBM wants me to throw all these to trash and start from the beginning again.

You're right that currently you can't directly use LotusScript in XPages, however, you can call agents and pass in documents. Also porting LS to SSJS really doesn't take long and makes for a big performance improvement.

2. Header and Footer. A company specific layout typically has a header and footer (implemented as subforms before) where header opens some div tags and the footer closes them. How do I do this with XPages? I've tried e.g. custom controls ("Item not found") and placing the HTML retrieved with Ajax to div with .outerHTML (footer does not render correctly).

You need to have a look at custom controls and the editable area control. The editable area allows you to insert other custom controls (the equivalent of a subform) inside each other. You can create a "layout" custom control and then insert the content inside it on each XPage. You can download Tim Clark and my Lotusphere presentation which steps you through creating a new XPages application from here: http://mattwhite.me/storage/show112.zip

3. Security. In an HTTP agent I can choose to run it with user's rights or signer rights. Now in my XPage I'm creating an Excel (.xlsx) file in the server side which I need to send to the user via HTTP. In this process I need to (in my understanding) write this file to the disk but the user does not have rights to do that. Am I correct that XPages code always runs with user's rights?

You are correct for the moment. In 8.5.2 you will have the ability to run code as the XPage signer.

4. Slowness. Development typically involved hundreds or thousands iterations where I save a small change and test it with a browser. When I save a form or agent I can get the result to my browser page in the same second. When I save an XPage (have to use mouse for saving bec usually Crtl-S does not work) it takes about 30 sec to build before it shows up on my browser! This slows down development a lot. Even the subsequent page loads are slower than they are for the same thing in a form and agent, even if I set the XPage to stay in memory.

That is very surprising. I find it is best to develop locally rather than on a server, but I really don't have a problem and that's running inside a virtual machine. What spec hardware are you using?

5. You still need to create the form! Why? Form is also just a presentation layer.

The form is now the equivalent of a table in a relational database, it is a *great* way of separating design from content. And it also gives you the cool abilities to have multiple forms tied to a single XPage.

I think overall, if you spend a little time reading the resources out there for getting started with XPages that you'll see that XPages are a *huge* step up from the 15 year old technology that we've been forced to use in Domino web development for the last few releases. I agree there is a steep learning curve but it really is worth the effort.

Matt

Feedback response number WEBB85SK6B created by ~Denise Xanamanoni on 05/25/2010