THE VIEW -- Build a State-of-the-Art XPages Feed Reader — Enabling Sharing Among Multiple Users

Welcome back to our series on XPages development! In the first installment, “Build a State-of-the-Art XPages Feed Reader — The Essentials” (November 2009), we walked you through the design and construction of an XPages-based feed reader application, Dennis 0.1 (Figure 1). You learned how to create custom controls, work with server-side JavaScript (SSJS), link to Notes data objects, use the Source tab, apply themes, set partial refresh events, leverage the Dojo Toolkit, and call Java objects directly from your XPage.

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Now we’ll show you how to add new features to that application, so you can allow multiple users to share the same database and articles with each other. You’ll learn how to work with scoped variables, use highly efficient Notes data techniques, and manage user-selection information. We’ll also spend some time showing how to implement the control that uploads photos to user profiles and pre-sizes the images for display.

The techniques you’ll learn require a deeper understanding of the underlying structure of XPages applications, so that’s where we’ll start — you’ll see how XPages is a JavaServer Faces (JSF) implementation and, at its foundation, all about Java.You may never need to explore this deeply in your own applications, but you will be well-served to understand how the Domino server and Designer client translate those visual elements into rendered HTML. As you'll see, the process is far more transparent than any behavior of Domino has been before.