Ryan Homan

Well, I have successfully completed my 2nd Lotusphere as of about a week ago. Overall, it was a success. This being my second year, I knew a little bit more how things work, and got to go to a few more things this year. Also, I didn’t spend that much time in the product showcase so I didn’t have a million emails and voicemails from all these vendors I will never work with, but I ended up with 5 or 6 new t-shirts. I also was able to utilize my evenings a little better this year, and had plans almost every night. I feel like I learned quite a few things, some of which I’ve already used in one of my projects, and I really want to start using a framework for helping with development. I was also impressed with IBM’s commitment to Lotus and what they are planning to do in the future. They are really putting a great deal of resources in making their products work better by using all the technology we have today. Just some resources that I wanted to point out. I really like what Nathan Freeman did with his hair. Check out his blog at http://www.lotus911.com/nathan/escape.nsf Also, Rich Waters framework, Ext.nd is coming along well and is great for those who want to web enable their apps extremely quickly. Check out his work at http://www.rich-waters.com/blog/ Well thats all for now, and I look forward to what Lotus surprises us with next year.

I learned from my boss today that in the Notes User Group Meeting in Cincinnati yesterday, it was brought up that running an SSL cert on your domino server will cause about a 25% performance decrease and since we have been seeing some performance issues, we are now looking to offload that to either our router or some other way. I personally attended the Notes User Group in Columbus yesterday and I would have to say the I was a little disappointed in the turnout of only about 10 people, but the presentations were very good. We had a presentation of ProcessIt by Teamwork Solutions, a IBM rep talking about Notes 8 and composite apps, and finally Rich Waters showing off Ext.nd and what they done recently and I would have to say that the framework is making great process and I look forward to seeing what those guys come up with in the near future.  Hopefully a stable release so I can use it in my production apps at work. Right now I can only play with it in test mode.

I just learned this week how to change the default login page to a custom page that you can design. The instructions are as follows.
Open domcfg.nsf on the server you want to change the login page on. Edit the document and point it to the database that will contain the new login page (it can be in domcfg.nsf as well). Specify the form name that will be the login page and it should now take affect. Make sure you leave the fields username and password on the new form, but other than that use whatever customizations you want. If you have questions, let me know.

While working on a problem that randomly seemed to happen, I ran across the following issue. A form on the web with a computed subform would allow you to enter your data, but when it saved the document, it would choose the wrong subform. I narrowed the problem down to the computed field that determines the subform. It was calculated based on the query_string from the url that was passed. I spent hours trying to find out why the query string was blank when the page was submitted. Finally I came across this post on the forums here.
This explained my problem and now we are thinking about writing the javascript necessary to work around this problem until it is fixed in Domino 8