I was just kind of poking around the Web on a bunch of different subjects and was looking for what your latest musings on .NET might be when I stumbled on the latest post of your update to this subject. Well, as it turns out, I'm currently working on a horrid project that has to go through all the documents in a set of NSFs and, for each one where a field has 1 specific value, search all the other DBs for any document where that field has any one of 3 values and an timestamp within a specific range. I've wrestled the past week on different ways to restructure it and was bemoaning the fact that I can't use C# at work but then I saw your latest update, read it, caught up in reverse order on the postings about this and it all clicked. Monday morning, I'll be wrapping those docs and this little project is in the bag.

And, yes, this is all LotusScript. I'll believe IBM has made Java king of Notes dev when I can write a Java agent in the Designer, set a breakpoint in NotesMain and click the Eclipse Debug\As Java button. And define my view columns in Groovy or Jython.

So you tend to debug more. We have tons of run-time diagnostic stuff too (as our product is meant to be used in secure environments) meaning that since we have more state information during every single cycle, debugging is far easier.

(or so we've found. The 160,000+ lines of Lotuscript in FirM are over 10 years old, OO based and - I'm rather proud to say - still working)

---* Bill

These are definitely cool things, and I use this all the time. It's always worth the initial investment, because you don't have to debug for hours somewhere down the line because you've made a typo with a field name.

"Thumbs up" for real world examples that are useful and work and kindly given up for the price of reading through an article.

Also, in your first code sample, you never instantiated your database object before calling "set view = database.GetView("InvoicesByUserName")"

If only I'd read that 10 years ago. The trouble is I probably wouldn't have done (no offence), as, personally, I don't learn that way. Reading the virtues of a methodology and seeing a high-level abstracted demo rarely makes me think how I could best apply it. It's only when I have a moment and think "hey, a class would help here" that it clicks.

I'm hoping that providing a "real world" demo (and soon a download) of the classes above will help others who learn best by example....

http://www.slideshare.net/billbucha.. ..01-advanced-object-oriented-programming-for-lotusscript

;)

There's a lot more Lotuscript stuff up there if you're keen.

Cheers,

---* Bill

Keep up the good work. XPages is what IBM pushing because it can be use to bridge us to Connections. We still do most of our stuff using Lotusscript. There is a little bit of XPages but the core is Lotusscript and heaven for bit C/C++. To customers, it does not matter what it is in for us.

I'm tired of folks tagging 'legacy' onto something and hoping it sticks, to further an agenda. I'd venture a guess that most existing Domino apps are written in LS, if not many that are still formula language.

Formula, LS, Xpages, Java...all quite valid and current languages in the Domino ecosystem. If anything, I'd call Xpages a promising, somewhat cutting edge, maturing technology. For instance, we're just now getting a SSJS debugger in a couple months.

It looks like code templating for LotusScript isn't as flexible as for Java, where additional templates can be defined. But the preferences do allow templates to be added for Property Get. It takes a minute or so to set up, but if you have to add a number of properties for a class, I'm sure it's going to be worthwhile adding a skeleton to preferences for a start. I also use Scrapple, a sidebar widget from Snapps for storing snippets to copy and paste into Designer. With two screens the Scrapple pane automatically expands when you're in Designer.

I think of Domino simply as a NoSQL datastore with built-in security, authentication and authorization (readers and authors fields, roles...).

With modern HTML and JavaScript frameworks, like jQueryUI, Twitter Bootstrap, backbone.js you can build as complicated and beautiful UI as you like. Then write agents to process the data you POST via ajax calls to nsf database. And you also need to write agents that return data - just like your example.

Another thing I like in Domino is view design. You have graphic tools to design your views any way it seems fit for your application. Then just do simple lookups against them. This is IMHO much easier than writing complicated JavaScript to query NoSql databases like MongoDB.

If only there were more LS functions to process text, lists and arrays, e.g., like in Python. And Lotusscript editor is a joke.

Please, don't give up on your writing.

Do you have any examples of LS code templates in getters that you mentioned? I'm not sure what you mean.

Even though the sessions I give are on XPages, I still do a lot of LotusScript. An added benefit of this approach is that the same kind of wrapper can be used for Java in XPages in a managed bean, for example. If you're already familiar with the LotusScript it makes the transition easier. It also makes support across XPages and LotusScript more standardised. Many Domino apps will still be at core LotusScript and traditional Notes Client for some time yet.

I've given quite a bit of thought over recent months (years even) about quitting blogging. I just can't seem to though.

Thanks, by the way. Feedback like yours is what keeps me from stopping. I just need to know it's worthwhile.

It's hard to gauge interest levels on a blog and I honestly just thought that there would be little to no interest in this topic whatsoever.

It's good to know it's not in vain.

I just noticed another error in the code! The CStr( is missing a closing ) !!

The dev track was pretty much all XPages all the time. Meanwhile most of the developers I talked to told me that the bulk (if not all) of their day-to-day work is still traditional Notes client/web dev. So for them, the sessions offered nothing they could use when they got back to work today.

On the other hand I can use this post NOW. So thanks (and please don't stop).

Coming up with these classes requires a deep knowledge of the language AND a good understanding of the business domain and work flow. Those don't come overnight and IBM haven't been forthcoming with an abundance of examples so thanks to your experience we get to reap the benefits.

Thank you.