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Category Application Development Best Practices Build Process Production
Whether it's simply copying and pasting files to a Domino production server and manually setting the ACLs, or creating a complete system with quality gates and automated approvals, somehow we manage to get our Notes applications out into the world.

Usually, the focus is primarily on the development group’s build and deployment requirements, since the code starts with them. Then we try to figure out how to get the code onto a production server. However, it is just as important--if not more so--to focus primarily on the Domino administrators requirements, as 1) they are ultimately responsible for the server, and 2) most support calls go to admins first. In most organizations, the Domino Administrator is not a full-time position, but these individuals are responsible for managing their Domino servers. So, would it surprise you to hear that many issues developers face are also concerns for administrators?

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Posted by Richard Sharpe At 1:14 PM | Location Beverly, MA | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category Lotus Notes Migration

Last week, Google announced its tool to aid migration from Lotus Notes to Google Apps, and they dropped a few respectable names of people/organizations used as case studies to prove how smoothly this all went.

Upon further investigation, it’s apparent that the migration from Lotus Notes currently includes only mail, contacts and calendar. While these are undoubtedly the most used applications in any Notes/Domino -based organization, they are far from the only applications used. If they were, the organization in all likelihood would have moved away from Notes years ago. So what about all the other mission-critical applications and data stored within them?

Well, a whitepaper from Google states:

“Based on where the targets are for various applications, different tools can be used for importing data into Google Apps . Import APIs for Google Spreadsheets and Google Sites are the two primary mechanisms for moving data into Google Apps.”

I searched on Google’s site, and on the web using Google, for more information on these API’s and found nothing. Even a similar question, submitted on Google’s Help Forum on July 16^th, hasn’t been answered, at the time of this post, by Google or anyone else.

Posted by Richard Sharpe At 9:59 AM | Location Beverly, MA | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category Build Process Development Production Best Practices
Last week I blogged about the difference in culture between Notes development teams and other development teams with regard to using Version Control Systems.

Let’s go one step further, and look at the next natural step in creating an efficient process to deploy Notes databases to different servers automatically.

Currently, this is a hot topic for all development teams regardless of language used. There are numerous case studies, webinars and presentations based on real life stories that prove automating builds not only saves time and money, but ensures consistency and robustness in the databases deployed to testing and production servers.

So what is an ‘Automated Build Process’?

After a database is completed or updated by a developer, there are several additional actions or steps the developer or administrator will need to perform before the database is deployed to a test server so that QA can commence testing, or from a Test server to Production (Figure 1). These steps are your build process, whether you have written them down or not. Note: I have omitted ‘developers copying to the production server’ for reasons I will explain later.

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Posted by Richard Sharpe At 11:32 AM | Location Phoenix, AZ USA | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category version management source code control Application Development Best Practices
I have been developing applications in Java for the past 7 or 8 years and developing applications in other languages for an additional XX. As a newcomer to Notes/Domino Development, I was surprised at the cultural differences in the way Version Control Systems (VCS) are viewed by Notes development teams versus Java development teams.

As part of my new role with Teamstudio, I have been speaking with Notes developers from different organizations over the last couple of weeks. It is clear that they have a good understanding of the file locking functionality (check in and check out) of version control systems. However other important capabilities of VCSs seem to be unknown to many of these same developers. Since these features directly address the developers’ need to create and deploy applications faster and with higher quality, I think it’s worth reviewing some of these capabilities.

The following is a summary of the important features of a VCS:

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Posted by Richard Sharpe At 5:14 PM | Location Phoenix, AZ USA | Permalink | Comments (4) |