Today, I released version 2.14.0 of the XPages Jakarta EE Support project. As with the last few releases, this is primarily about bug fixes and compatibility as I prepare for the big switch in 3.0, but there are some notable, if small, feature additions.

To begin with, I improved handling of reading JSON in NoSQL entities when reading from a view. This applies to the @ItemStorage(type=ItemStorage.Type.JSON) annotation on entity properties, which causes the value to be loaded and stored as JSON, useful for storing custom class types in a document. Now, such values can be read from view entries - previously, this processing was skipped for those. Of note when using this: normally, storing as JSON will automatically set the item's summary flag to false, to avoid overflowing the summary limit. However, you can add @ItemFlags(summary=true) to the property to override this behavior so that the values can show up in views.

Additionally, I added the ability to use JAXRSClassContributors inside the NSF. These were originally an internal mechanism for the project to dynamically add REST endpoints and extensions, like those used by MVC and OpenAPI. Now, though, I've made it so that such classes can be registered via a file named "META-INF/services/org.openntf.xsp.jaxrs.JAXRSClassContributor" in the NSF, and also added the ability to specify configuration properties. The latter is important because, though all xsp.properties values were already inserted into the JAX-RS configuration, there was no way to provide non-string values. This came up in the context of MVC, which has a CSRF configuration property that must be an enum value.

For the final feature, I improved support for JAX-RS's status-indicating exceptions, such as NotSupportedException and BadRequestException. Previously, the project supported translating NotFoundException to a 404, but now it will also translate these other standard exceptions to their corresponding HTTP statuses.

The release is otherwise rounded out by a number of bug fixes to fix problems encountered in the wild. Additionally, I added a workaround for some classpath pollution in the latest Domino 14 beta - I hope that the trouble will be gone for GA, but this project should handle it either way.

Though it's been over a month since CollabSphere 2023, I've somehow now yet gotten around to talking about it here. Time to remedy that!

Webinar and Workshop

I presented a couple sessions at CollabSphere, but the meatiest was my workshop on the XPages Jakarta EE project. A bit before the show, I wrote a post discussing modes of development with it and that formed the structure of the workshop.

It also formed the structure of August's OpenNTF webinar. Fortunately, unlike the workshop, the webinar was recorded, and that is up on OpenNTF's YouTube channel. Though the workshop was longer and had some refinements and audience discussion, they both worked from the same original slide deck and so the webinar did a pretty good job of covering the same material.

As part of the presentations, I created four versions of the same basic to-do tracker app, written in each of the four modes I talked about. I put them up in the project repository with a quick README introducing each of them. With the project installed (they were written to 2.13.0 and above), you should be able to sync the ODPs with NSFs in Designer and poke around yourself. They're all intentionally-similarly structured and basic, with all of their elements in either Java classes, file resources, or stylesheets. They're also all intentionally under-developed, so you're not allowed to make fun of them.

JNX

This one will be a doozy! In fact, it's such a doozy that I'm going to keep kicking the can down the road as far as properly talking about it.

In short, Domino JNX is a more-modern API for Domino access - it was initiated and is used heavily by the Domino REST API (DRAPI), but also stands on its own. It started out essentially as another swing at Karsten Lehmann's Domino JNA and shares a lot of the same ideas and approaches (and code - the committer info in the GitHub repo is deceptive, as I got to paste a whole mountain of existing code from another repo into this one and thus got credit for it).

Now that it's open source, there's some significant work to do as far as documentation, examples, integration, and distribution go. I plan to find time to improve a lot of these aspects, including blogging here, though it's the sort of thing that always ends up below other priorities.

In any event, it's quite neat and has a lot of good capabilities. I plan to write a driver for JNoSQL for it, either to be alongside or to wholly supplant the Notes.jar-based one currently used by the project. The neat thing there is that users of XPages JEE won't have to care much: it'll just get a bit faster in parts but should largely work the same, except maybe with a change to the way you point at other databases.