At this year's Connect, Philippe Riand and I co-presented two sessions: one on ways to integrate your apps into the Connections UI and one on Darwino's role for Domino developers. I've uploaded the slides to SlideShare:

DEV-1430 - IBM Connections Integration: Exploring the Long List of Options

DEV-1467 - Give a New Life to Your Notes/Domino Applications and Leverage IBM Bluemix, Watson, & Connections (effectively, "the Darwino session")

IBM Connect 2017 is less than a week away, and I've been furiously prepping for a couple parts of what is promising to be a busy conference.

On Monday, before the official kickoff of the conference, OpenNTF is co-hosting a Hackathon, where attendees will work on one of several potential projects. The goal is to learn about new development methods, work with new people, and hopefully kick off some useful open-source projects to boot.

During the conference proper, I'll be presenting two sessions, both alongside Philippe Riand:

On Wednesday at 10 AM, we'll be discussing IBM Connections integration - specifically, the numerous hooks provided by Connections locally and on the cloud for integrating your application as seamlessly as possible. That will be "IBM Connections Integration: Exploring the Long List of Options" in room 2006.

Then, on Thursday at 9 AM, we'll be discussing Darwino and its role integrating with and extending Domino applications. This should be a particularly-interesting one, covering what Darwino is, how its bidirectional replication with Domino works, and some example scenarios for reporting on and bringing forward Domino apps. That will be "Give a New Life to Your Notes/Domino Applications and Leverage IBM Bluemix, Watson and Connections" in room 2000.

Even with many of our usual community friends unable to make it to the conference or having moved on to other platforms, Connect is shaping up to be a worthwhile conference, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing everyone who is there!

Last week was Connect 2016 and, while I don't have a full review of it, I felt that it was a pretty successful conference. The new venue was much less weird and more purpose-fitting than expected. Moreover, while the conference content wasn't bursting with announcements and in-depth technical dives like at something like WWDC, it did feel a bit more grounded and less marketing-hollow than the last two. So I'll call it a win.

On the OpenNTF front, the conference saw a bit more in the slow rollout of our improved processes and server infrastructure. Prominic has been graciously providing us with servers to run the Atlassian stack of development apps, and we're gradually putting these to use in building and tracking projects run through OpenNTF. Christian Güdemann talked about his company's move to more-structured development using tools like this, as well as an overview of where OpenNTF in particular is heading. Before too long, the OpenNTF Domino API will fall in line with this, switching to a Gitflow-style branch structure and a clean workflow between Stash, Bamboo, and Jira.

The conference also saw the 1.0 release of Darwino. If you're not familiar with it, Darwino is a platform for Java-based development that provides a document database (with improved takes on classic Domino features like hierarchies and reader/author security) and services that will run the same business logic on Java app servers, iOS, and Android. Of particular interest for Connect was the Domino connector, which does two-way replication with Domino databases. The free-for-non-commercial-use Community Edition is a good place to dive in, and we'll be putting out tutorial videos and posts in the weeks to come.

All in all, last week set the stage for the year to come, and I think it should be a very interesting year indeed.

Phew, well, my plugin series continues its hiatus due to how thoroughly swamped I've been with work the last couple months. It will return in time, ready to dive into the fruitful and terrifying topic of Maven-ization. In the mean time, we're very close indeed now to this year's Connect, and I'm looking forward to it.

There are a number of sessions that I'm rather looking forward to, but I'd like to mention two due to my indirect and direct association with them, respectively.

First, on Monday at 11:30 is OpenNTF – From Donation to Contribution, presented by Christian Güdemann. Though OpenNTF has been comparatively quiet externally this past year, we've been building up a suite of tools and integrations (such as the Slack channel, which you can join with the link on the right of the OpenNTF page). This will relate to the Maven posts I'll be writing: Domino-related development is necessarily getting more structured, and that leads to new techniques and tools to help manage the additional complexity and reap the benefits of it.

Secondly, on Tuesday at 4:30 is Don't give up on Domino! Introducing Darwino: A New Lifeline for Domino Developers and Customers, presented by Philippe Riand and myself. We'll be talking about Darwino's interaction with Domino, particularly how you can use it to create web and mobile apps that bi-directionally replicate with Domino and work offline.

Beyond that session, you should track us down to talk about Darwino. Though I am, granted, biased on the matter, I think there's quite a bit there to interest Domino developers, beyond just the prospect of data replication.