Around the start of the year, I had a bit of a dalliance with the idea of running XPages outside Domino. The upshot of that project is that it is indeed possible to do so, but there'd be some work to do to make it practical.

This month, we revisited the idea with a healthy dose of Darwino to provide some undergirding technology, with the goal of being able to run a plain old XPages app on mobile devices backed by Darwino DBs and replicating back to Domino. There was a lot of fiddling involved, but it works:

Android is the natural first target, but iOS is about 70% there, with the scaffolding loading up to the point where it loads a page but currently with a bit of trouble when it comes to resolving data classes and executing renderers.

What Specifically Is Going On?

We set out a few required parameters to call it a successful proof-of-concept:

• It has to use the actual XPages framework - that is to say, the jar files shipped with Notes/Domino
• The XPages themselves have to be shared among Domino and the Darwino app, in the form of their Java "intermediate" source (compiling from .xsp source is possible but is a whole other thing)
• It has to use xp:dominoView and xp:dominoDocument data sources
• It has to load the Extension Library
• It has to use ancillary elements from the app: managed beans, themes, CSS, images, SSJS libraries

This checks all of those boxes, and it's pretty satisfying to see in action.

The Stumbling Blocks

As I discussed in my post about the original project, there are aspects of XPages that are meant to make this sort of thing possible, with the core parts abstracting out different platforms and runtime environments. Over the years, though, assumptions about Domino and OSGi crept in, with newer additions and the Extension Library taking a bit less care to be environment-neutral.

Moreover, XPages is not open source and I don't have any particular special access to it, making this whole thing essentially, in the video-game sense, hard mode. There are a handful of classes that needed to be outright swapped out, like the annoyingly-final NotesContext class, but there was much less of that than I'd thought.

After that, getting the data to point to Darwino was pleasantly straightforward. Other than a handful of areas where the NAPI comes in, the Domino data sources largely adhere to the rules of the lotus.domino interfaces and don't make assumptions about the implementing classes (this is essentially how ODA shims in as well).

What This Could Be Useful For

With the right fleshing out, this could be a real way to run existing XPages apps on mobile devices. That could be pretty useful on its own, but I don't think that carrying forward XPages apps as-is is the right idea. The side effect of this, though, is that you have a functioning XPages app in a normal old .war file project, structured with Maven or Gradle, and ready to be molded into newer frameworks using whatever tooling you'd like. No Designer, no OSGi, no Servlet 2.4/2.5, just a clean basis running your existing logic and ready to be improved.

If the mountain of existing XPages code is going to have a future, I think it should be something like this.