Introduction to
XPages for administrators

November 28, 2012

About Per Henrik Lausten

Full-time developer and part-time administrator with my own one-man company

Chairman of NotesNet an assocation of 25 independent consultants

Member of the board at OpenNTF open source for IBM Notes/Domino and IBM Connections

Member of the board at DanNotes

Mentor for XPages developers in several companies

Experienced XPages web application developerstartdithjerte.dk

mediaplus.dk

cbbpremiumpro.dk

collaborationtoday.info

sherlockapp.dk

and more

Agenda

Warning!

What is XPages?

You

Maximizing performance

Application development

RESTful web services

Configuration and administration

Security

Troubleshooting and monitoring

Impress your developers and users

Homework

Questions

How many of you run web servers?How many of you run XPages web apps?

Warning!

It's the Wild Wild Web (WWW)so normal rules do not apply!

The structure and predictability of the Notes client is gone

The web is different than the Notes client

But don't worry! you can blame your developers - and Internet Explorer

What is XPages?

Web development platform based on JavaServer Faces (JSF) 1.2

Uses HTML, CSS, server-side Javascript, client-side Javascript, Java, Dojo Javascript framework

Runs on IBM Domino 8.5+ and IBM XWork Server 8.5+

Can use 3rd party (commercial and open source) frameworks such as:UI: Blueprint, Twitter bootstrap, etc.

Mobile UI: jQuery Mobile, Dojo Mobile, Sencha Touch, etc.

Java: Google Guava, iText, JDBC connectors, etc.

Uses the Notes/Domino NSF for data storage (NoSQL)

Can easily extend and modernize existing Notes applications

It's the future!

Examples of XPages applications

More examples of XPages applications

You

Your job as administrator is very important:You help developers

You help users

You manage the servers

In other words: you are involved in the complete application lifecycle

Your developers' job: build the system

Maximizing performance

Hardware and OS levelAdd lots of RAM

64-bit OS and 64-bit IBM Domino/IBM XWork Server (only 32-bit on Linux available)

SSD for the Domino program files

Adjust Java heap size: HTTPJVMMaxHeapSize=512M (appr. 25% of available memory). Default can be very low!

XPages server-wide performance settings via data/properties/xsp.propertiesPersistence mode (xsp.persistence.mode):Keep pages in memory (best performance)

Keep pages on disk (best scalability)

Keep only the current page in memory (scales and performs well)
Default on 8.5.2+

Compression mode (xsp.compress.mode): gzip

Aggregate resources (xsp.resources.aggregate): true

Maximizing performance (continued)

Use Single Copy XPage Design: improve performance for apps using the same template

Caching of application dataDbLookup and DbColumn with cache:
http://openntf.org/s/dblookup-dbcolumn-with-cache-sort-and-unique
(to reduce hits at the "backend" database). Consider modifying it to use applicationScope for some lookups

Scoped beans (cached application logic and data)

Caching of resources such as CSS, client-side JS and images (to reduce number of requests from browser to server)Application Properties caching of JS, CSS, images and files (defaults to no caching, and is set in each database)

Internet Site rules (you do use Internet sites in your Domino Directory, right?)

HTTP response headers, incoming URL pattern such as *.jpg, add Expires header

XPages Resource Servlet (xsp.expires.global, default 10 days): used for /.ibmxspres resources such as compressed CSS and compressed JS

Maximizing performance (continued)

Pre-load certain XPages applications to improve startup timesXPagesPreload=1 in notes.ini

XpagesPreloadDB=servername!!path/mydb.nsf/myxpage.xsp,servername!!path/anotherdb.nsf

Test application using the Yahoo YSlow analyzer (tests 23 of the 34 rules from the Yahoo Web Performance Best Practices and Rules document). http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

Demo of compression and aggregation

First load: appr. 300 KB

Following requests: appr. 3 KB

http://sherlockapp.dk

Application development

Domino Dojo versions8.5.0 == Dojo 1.1.1

8.5.1 == Dojo 1.3.2

8.5.2 == Dojo 1.4.3

8.5.3 == Dojo 1.6.1 (Dojo 1.5 had initial support for mobile)

9.0 == Dojo 1.8

OneUI versions8.5.0 == OneUI 1.x?

8.5.1 == OneUI 1.6 (2.01 included for evaluation purposes only)

8.5.2 == OneUI 2.01

8.5.3 == OneUI 2.1

9.0 == OneUI 3.0

Application development (continued)

IBM Upgrade Pack 1 vs. the OpenNTF Extension Library

Benefits of UP1 and Ext. Lib

InstallationInstalling UP1 on 8.5.3 (OS installer)

Installing Extension Library on 8.5.2
(manually or via the Plugins Deployment for Domino project on OpenNTF)

Installing Extension Library on 8.5.3 (using an Update Site database to deploy it as OSGi plugins)

Development (continued)

Domino releases and fix packs improve XPages a lot! So use Domino 8.5.3 FP3 (latest as of November 2012)

Help your developers and users: turn of the intranet setting that forces Internet Explorer to use IE6 Standards Mode!

The Update Site method for OSGi installations can be used to easily deploy Jar files, jQuery etc. that are going to be used server wide

Source control: use an external service such as Github and Bitbucket, or setup your own in-house server

RESTful web services

Domino Access Services (DAS): Provides a REST API that represents Domino objects in JSON format

Provides easy access to backend data for e.g. mobile apps and XPages apps that needs to create, read, update and delete (CRUD)

How to install: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/ddwiki.nsf/xpViewCategories.xsp?lookupName=Domino%20Data%20Service

Must be enabled on server level (internet sites documents), database level and view level

The DELETE HTTP method is disabled by default on internet sites

RESTful web services (continued)

Examples of GET requests:GET http://server/api/data
Gets information about the databases on the server

GET http://server/path/db.nsf/api/data/collections
Gets information about the views and folders in a database

GET http://server/path/db.nsf/api/data/collections/name/viewname?start=0&count=3
Gets information about entries in a view of a database

GET http://server/path/db.nsf/api/data/documents/unid/
Get a specific document

Questions

How many of you use Internet Sites in your Domino Directory?

Configuration and administration

Domino Directory (names.nsf)Use Internet Sites

Use substitution rules (friendly URLs)

Use Single Server or Multiple Servers (SSO) session authentication

LTPA:set Expiration to a high number (example: 480 minutes) because LTPA sessions are not extended even though the user is active

Then use Idle Session Timeout and set it to a (example: 60 minutes)

Configuration and administration (cont.)

Use Domino Web Server Configuration (domcfg) to set up Sign In, Change Password and Error & Response mappings to have login, change password and error/response forms with a corporate UI (?login and ?changepassword commands)Set HTTP_PWD_CHANGE_CACHE_HOURS=0 to remove caching of old password

Use Auto Login to set up remember me functionality (from OpenNTF)LTPA uses Lotus Multi-Byte Character Set (LMBCS) from IBM Lotus to encode the LTPA tokens. You need to install the jar files icu4j-49_1.jar and icu4j-charset-49_1.jar on the server in the \jvm\lib\ext folder. They can be downloaded from http://site.icu-project.org/download

Configuration and administration (cont.)

Set up an error page for non-nsf resources: HTTPMultiErrorPage=/error.htmlIt has to be a static HTML file. It can not be redirected to a NSF

Use the latest ODS (CREATE_R85_DATABASES=1)

Central control of lots of XPages properties via xsp.propertiesOn the IBM Domino and IBM XWork server in data/properties there is a xsp.properties.sample file

XPages creates lots of temp files. You can move them to another drive by using the xsp.persistence.dir.xspstate option in xsp.propertiesexample: xsp.persistence.dir.xspstate=e:\\xspstate

Security

XPages can use session, sessionAsSigner, and sessionAsSignerWithFullAdminRights (!)

Access is controlled in the server document

Tell your developers: Use "Hide design element from: Web browsers" for forms and views when moving an internal Notes client app to the external web

Troubleshooting and monitoring

Add an error page with corporate UI to web applications

Use a central logging system such as OpenLog (from OpenNTF)

Inspect log files (log.nsf, console.log, xpages log files in IBM_TECHNICAL_SUPPORT, etc)

Use XPages Log File Reader for easy access to log files (from OpenNTF)

Use XPages Toolbox for profiling, monitoring and inspection of XPages applications (from OpenNTF)

Use XPages Debug Toolbar for access to debug tools useful during development (from OpenNTF)

Using Java: watch for memory leaks on the server

Use YourKit for profiling of JVM/memory issues

Impress your developers and users

Install XPages Extension Library (from OpenNTF) or Upgrade Pack 1 (from IBM)

Use the XPages demo application (http://dev.openntf.org/) to see what Extension Library and Upgrade Pack 1 offers

Install Auto Login to have remember me functionality (from OpenNTF)

Upgrade existing teamrooms and discussion databases to Teamroom XL and Discussion XL (from Extension Library or Upgrade Pack 1)

Impress your developers and users (cont.)

Install XPages Log File Reader (from OpenNTF) and send your developers a link

Tell your developers about XPages Debug Toolbar (from OpenNTF)

Tell your developers about the multipage messages phase listener (by Mark Leusink: http://linqed.eu/?p=66)

Use a central OpenLog database

Load commonly used code elements such as Java JAR files as OSGi modules

Homework

Read XPages Portable Command Guide

Questions?

Per Henrik Lausten
per@PHL-Consult.dk
PHL-Consult.dk
per.lausten.dk/blog
@perlausten

PHL-Consult.dkinfo@PHL-Consult.dk

Per Henrik Laustenper.lausten.dk/blog/twitter.com/perlausten