Over the years, I've spawned a number of open source projects, both in my personal GitHub account and in OpenNTF's, but it'd be fair to say that not all of them are actively updated or see common use.

Nowadays, I have a set of tools that I actively develop (either solo or with a team) and which make up critical parts of my development infrastructure, and I figured it'd be useful to give an overview of them.

NSF ODP Tooling

This is my current favorite project by virtue of how much time it saves me every day and for its future potential. I wrote a series on this project a while ago, so I won't go over all the details of it here. The gist of it, though, is that this project lets me have a Maven tree for one of my big client projects that includes an array of OSGi bundles and have the Maven install project build all of those, assemble an update site with them and a bevy of dependencies, compile over a dozen NSFs (most with complicated Java code), and end up with a distribution ZIP containing importable update sites and deployable NTFs, all from my Mac with no Designer involved.

I have visions of this project forming the central infrastructure for a post-Designer world, and that's shaping up in a couple ways so far. One of those ways is the DXL and XPages LSP contributor component that allows for pretty-solid editing of, uh, DXL and XPages in tools that use the XML Language Server, such as Eclipse and Visual Studio Code. And that plays in to the other project I use daily, the XPages JEE Runtime.

XPages JEE Runtime

This is the project that started as a frenzied descent into madness and which I eventually hammered into shape enough to run real apps (with a side path where I also got XPages running on Android and iOS).

Now, this is the main way I do development on that client app. I have an Open Liberty server set up in Eclipse and a webapp variant of the XPages app that points to the same XPages, Custom Controls, and Java code from the NSF's ODP representation, and I have some hooks to direct all database references to the DB running in my dev VM. Since it's not a 100% perfect representation of the Domino environment, I still need to periodically sync it back to the NSF and test how it runs in there (and with the OSGi environment that I'm not using in the webapp), but I'm experienced enough at this point to generally know the potential pitfalls.

There's also a dark part of me that keeps being tempted to actually use this for production at some point, since it works so well now, and pushes aside so many hassles of loading and deploying on Domino itself. That would play in to the next project, the one that's hosting this very blog right now.

Domino Open Liberty Runtime

This is my project where I set up a sidecar Open Liberty instance alongside Domino, which allows for using native local NSF access while also having a full, modern Jakarta EE server with all the bells and whistles.

Though this project is a bit more staid than some of the others, I've gone in and made some interesting improvements lately. One was my journey into RunJava the other month, which I still think is a little too cute to put into production, but which actually should do the job just fine.

The other improvement, though, has some more immediate benefits. I added the ability to specify and auto-download AdoptOpenJDK Java runtimes to use instead of Domino's provided JVM. These runtimes still gain the same benefit of running with local Domino NSF access, but aren't constrained by Domino's once-again-long-in-the-tooth JVM. So you can, for example, specify that you'd rather bring in Java 14 and the runtime will auto-download it for you and launch Liberty using that. I haven't quite rolled that one out to this blog server yet, but it's on the docket. I'd love to bring in Java records, for example, and now there's nothing stopping me from doing so.

XPages Jakarta EE Support

I didn't have a good segue for this one.

This is a project I started a couple years ago initially as a way to expand on Martin Pradny's original plugin to make writing JAX-RS resources inside an NSF easy. It's grown into my project to essentially try to bring the XPages runtime up to code, at least in the parts that I want to use for work. Though it's constrained by the hard limit of the ancient Servlet API Domino's container provides, I've been able to bring in some important updates for EL and JAX-RS, and also allow for using CDI for managed beans and JAX-RS resources.

CDI is actually a whole huge topic that I have some draft posts for. As far as Java development is concerned, CDI is Important with a capital "I".

ODA

There's not a lot of fanfare with the OpenNTF Domino API, but that's largely intentional: as an improvement on the normal lsxbe API, it does its job and doesn't currently need any radical changes. I'm mostly including it here because, though it doesn't change much, it's periodically updated to cover the sprinkling of new Java methods HCL adds with each release.

generate-domino-update-site

While I don't use this project as such daily, I sure do benefit from its output. This is the Maven plugin that generates new update sites, which is required for up-to-date OSGi development for Domino in lieu of IBM/HCL ever updating their own release.

Other than being something I run every new Domino release, I've also made some improvements recently. Some of those just related to improving behavior in edge cases, but a nice one I added the other week was downloading of source components from Eclipse Neon. Though the source for the XPages runtime and the whole Expeditor scaffolding remain unavailable, I am able to look up and download the source for the unmodified Eclipse components, and this results in a more-pleasant development experience in Eclipse.

I have a few other projects that I use periodically, such as the NSF File Server, but those are the big-ticket ones.