Good News and a little retrospective  

By Eric McCormick | 1/24/18 1:36 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

The past year has been great fun. I’ve had a couple of major changes, including a change in job and beginning to work from home. I’ve also done a few different projects that I hadn’t been involved in before. I’ll get to those in a little bit, but first.. I am quite happy to have been named an IBM Champion, returning for the fourth year in a row.

Notes in 9: Dev Tools Grab Bag  

By Eric McCormick | 4/5/17 11:03 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

I’m on Notes in 9 again, with a “grab bag” of a couple of tools I’ve put together recently that may be of a varying degree of useful for other Domino + XPages developers. You don’t need these to do development, but for the right person, they may help with their development workflow.

Custom JSON Serialization With GSON  

By Eric McCormick | 1/23/17 8:40 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

Here’s a curious one, in which I found myself with a limitation of not being able to output JSON with scientific notation values. If you’re wondering why that is, since both JSON and JavaScript allow scientific notation of number values, you are absolutely correct and that’s a great question.

Rebirth: An App of Ice and Fire  

By Eric McCormick | 12/14/16 11:22 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

If you read my blog for any of the Saga of Servlets series, then I hope that you’re excited I’m returning to the application I put together for it. This time, it’s as a conversation piece in regards to some of the build process modernization I engaged in recently, in order to unify the code base in its git repository.

Git History Searching  

By Eric McCormick | 7/12/16 10:07 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

Here’s a quick tip from an example case I ran into at the day job relatively recently. I had a situation in which, due to one reason or another, a section of code had disappeared from an application. I happened to know exactly which design element (file) it disappeared from and, while I could have done so, I didn’t feel like only restoring the code (from an old, known working version), I also wanted to know what commit in my git repository showed its removal.

In Defense of Bower  

By Eric McCormick | 6/14/16 8:59 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

In case you’ve been living under a rock, bower is a package manager meant for web libraries/frameworks. It runs on top of Node and installs via npm. If this is new to you, you can probably see some pretty obvious advantages, such as the ability to keep libraries outside of your application’s project repository.

Site Anchors  

By Eric McCormick | 6/1/16 4:25 PM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

Site anchors, also known as anchor links, are a way to “deep link” your site with consistently navigable content. Such an approach often makes use of the ability for a browser to load/jump/scroll-to a named element (such as a heading or div) by its id attribute.

ICONUS and Other Topics  

By Eric McCormick | 5/19/16 8:52 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

If you were able to attend the ICON US (formerly IamLUG) virtual event, then you lucked out. There were a great many good sessions that I was sadly not able to attend all of, on account of unavoidable travel (more on that in a minute).

Using Node to Connect to a Notes/Domino NSF  

By Eric McCormick | 4/22/16 7:45 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

I’m back, with the third in my 3-part series on connecting to “almost anything”. This time, we’ll be interacting with a Notes/Domino NSF, via the domino-nsf packge (on npm) by Nils Tarjei Hjelme. This package is something I learned of in the #dominonodejs channel of the OpenNTF Slack chat.

Headless DDE Builds With Jenkins CI  

By Eric McCormick | 3/25/16 9:17 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

Last time I described a major building block which has made my efforts to have a build automation machine (in the process of being turned into a vm) for my largest application. This includes a number of advantages, from being able to produce a copy of the application design at a given commit/tag/version from its git repository on demand or on schedule.

XSLTProc in the Buff  

By Eric McCormick | 3/24/16 9:46 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

The DORA project (Domino On-disk Repository Assistant) from Cameron Gregor has gone through a couple incarnations, originally as DORA, then again as a plugin to Domino Designer (DDE), called Swiper. These are both great projects, benefitting the community in that our (git for dora) scm repositories (for swiper) are much tidier and there are less issues with the overhead of the metadata/etc. files (particularly with swiper).

Notes in 9: Docker + SonarQube  

By Eric McCormick | 2/25/16 1:01 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

I’m on Notes in 9 again. This time, I’m back with an introduction to general use of SonarQube, a great tool for code quality checking and coverage reporting which Christian Güdemann talked about in his IBM Connect session.

Connect Success  

By Eric McCormick | 2/2/16 3:26 PM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

IBM Connect 2016 is in full swing and I’m enjoying the sessions I’ve attended, some of the news announced from some of the IBM talent that has presented, and even had a good time at my session. Thank you to everyone that came to my session; we had a decent turn out. The promise of an “amazing demo” was, I hope, mostly true.

Starting Small to Go Big  

By Eric McCormick | 1/8/16 9:13 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

I was recently contacted to help clarify a couple of parts involved with getting set up similarly to what I’ve been moving towards and blogging about, both as far as project folder structure and as far as IDE setup. The developer was looking to get started with an app using a different client-side framework from what I usually work with, but that’s far from a problem, since they’re both part of the client-side puzzle and fit in as client-side assets.

2015: A Year In Review  

By Eric McCormick | 1/5/16 8:35 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

It’s a new year! 2016 is here and it’s off to a great start. I had some excellent time off with family, as I hope everyone else did, and I’m looking forward to what 2016 will bring, after such a successful 2015. In my day job, we’ve restructured how we go through our application development lifecycle and it is paying off with every feature release and major release.

Task Runners pt.4  

By Eric McCormick | 12/17/15 9:09 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

Last time, we covered how to install, configure, and use gulp to automate some useful tasks and how gulp is differentiated from Grunt. Moving ahead, it would be remiss if I didn’t cover some more of my Gulpfile.js, so in the effort of completing the immediate picture, here’s a collection of more of my tasks, broken apart for description.

Task Runners pt.3  

By Eric McCormick | 12/8/15 9:51 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

So, you may be wondering, why use gulp as opposed to Grunt? Honestly, if you’re familiar with one already, go with what you know; they’re both rather awesome and gulp, while newer, is gaining popularity enough to rival Grunt in its presence.

Task Runners pt.2: Grunt  

By Eric McCormick | 12/4/15 8:01 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

The two most common and well known task runners (though there are others, of course) are currently Grunt and gulp. There is a fair amount of overlap in what they seek to accomplish, but as with many open source projects, where they differ is in implementation and intent.

Notes in 9: Nginx + PageSpeed  

By Eric McCormick | 12/4/15 7:54 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

I’m on Notes in 9 again. This time, I’m back with a highlights tour of my MWLUG session. The subject is using Nginx as a reverse proxy in front of Domino, in combination with Google PageSpeed, to performance enhance your application, offload HTTPS certificate handling, and apply additional features to potentially improve your users’ experience.

Task Runners pt.1, An Introduction  

By Eric McCormick | 12/2/15 11:25 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

This series has been cooking longer than my turkey (about two weeks longer). It covers ground on a fair number of topics so please bear with me as we get started. I hope you’ll find something involved that makes you exclaim something to the effect of “that’s really useful! A task runner is, at its simplest, a “worker” that peforms tasks.

The Right Tool for the Job  

By Eric McCormick | 11/5/15 11:48 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

Most people that know me know that I have a certain take on development for Domino/XPages. This isn’t a bad thing, in fact I think it points to the great flexibility of the XPages runtime with which I spend most of my day job working.

A Java Rite of Passage  

By Eric McCormick | 10/19/15 9:29 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

The last couple of weeks has been a roller coaster of fun in regards to a work application and in regards to my extracurricular development activities. Suffice it to say, things are much improved and what follows is what I hope something that others can learn from, though a simple Google search makes me realize that I’m not only not the first, but bound to not be the last, to make the same mistake in Java development.

Miscellanea  

By Eric McCormick | 10/6/15 9:50 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

A few things have been on my mind over the last couple weeks and I thought I’d share them. Stay tuned for my demo app on Bluemix, and if I re-record what I need to, there may be yet another Notes in 9 video submission coming soon; the highlights of my MWLUG session.

MWLUG2015: AD113 – Speed Up Your Applications With Nginx and PageSpeed  

By Eric McCormick | 8/26/15 11:05 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

MWLUG has been going great, as expected. The worst thing I’ve been fighting is the overlap of some really good sessions. In fact, mine went up against two other app dev sessions and one entitled “free beer”. It would seem I need to do a better job of bribing and/or coercing @RichardMoy.

Speed Up Your Applications With Nginx and PageSpeed  

By Eric McCormick | 8/4/15 9:48 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

After a session chalk talk in January, I guess I’ve got the speaking bug. I feel like I have a lot to share, some of which is better done in-person. This time around, I’ll be presenting on why the segregated front-/back-end application development pattern is a performance enhancing boon.

XPages Comes to Bluemix  

By Eric McCormick | 7/10/15 12:02 PM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

It’s here! Ten days into the first month of the 2nd half of 2015, IBM’s XPages runtime (and XPages NoSQL DB service) are live in ‘beta’/experimental. Does that mean it will change? Absolutely.

Self-Hosting SCM Server Options  

By Eric McCormick | 7/7/15 7:59 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

Source Control has become a rallying point of sorts for me in the last few years. It has saved my bacon on a few occassions and source control in general (and git, specifically) is near and dear to me. I’m always on the quest for the best application development workflow, which can sometimes be difficult to achieve.

Prettify Your Error Code  

By Eric McCormick | 7/2/15 8:40 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

Here’s an interesting thing. The best part is that I can’t attribute myself with credit for the majority of the body of work involved. In fact, I had some help from an eagle-eyed Marky Roden who spotted a contributing issue, and an astounding three answers from Sven Hasselbach on a StackOverflow question on a key component subject.

The Road Goes Ever On and On  

By Eric McCormick | 6/22/15 8:47 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

My series is imperfect and doesn’t cover ideal ways of rolling an HttpServlet, but it does show the concept and the ability to do so within an NSF with minimal external server configuration. I’m excited for Toby Samples to follow up to his first post on getting JAX-RS up and running on Domino.

Building a Front-End, pt.2  

By Eric McCormick | 6/17/15 7:15 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

For as much theory and verbiage as yesterday’s post was, today’s will be primarily code-driven; something I hope you’re ready for. I’ll run through this all and hopefully I can illustrate succinctly as we go. HTML templating is useful because it frames out the structure of a page.