Upgrade to IE 7 vs Firefox 2

I was going through this month statistic of my blog. This come a little surprise to me. Both Firefox 2.0 and IE 7 a while ago.


For firefox, users 62% users already upgrade to 2.0 and another 5% is already on 2.0.0.1


For IE, only 19% of the users have upgraded to IE 7.

So what does this means? I myself is still on IE6. One of the reason was proven by the statistics. Most people are still on IE 6 so my development have to support them. And I can't install both IE 7 and IE 6 together on the same machine. Lets just see how fast IE 7 will gain momentum.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

After so many months of hard work, at last I have a break coming up. Going for vacation for the next one week.

So wish all the readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year :)

Product certification, is it important?

I have just pass the "IBM WebSphere Application Server V6.0 Network Deployment, Core Administration" exam. Thanks to Websphere User Group (WUG) Malaysia for providing free certification examination. So does this means I'm a certified WAS Administration. To be honest I won't dare to call myself that, at least for the moment until I have more hands-on experience. I do not have much experience on WAS. I use WAS before a few years back and that's just touching the surface. I have not don't real setup of the server, clustering, etc. I have just installed some J2EE application on the server. I just spend a few days going through some materials on WAS. Haven't that little experience helps a bit to understand the new WAS 6 easier. But being certified doesn't mean that I'm an experience guy. The certification does help me to understand the product much better (with or without experience). Anyway, I really appreciate WUG for giving free certification exam to the members. How about Lotus User Group (LUG), would they give free certification exams to the member?

I'm more experience in Lotus Domino/Notes. Does someone without certification means that he/she is not as good as someone with certification? I believe that I'm just as good as most certified Lotus person out there. Surely there are some really really expert in Lotus. Some are certified and some are not. In employment market, I think it does matters as someone with certification have some prove that he/she have the knowledge. But then again, by just reading and without experience, someone could pass the examination. It is not too difficult. So does certification really makes a different? And should I sit for Lotus examination just as a prove that I "know" Lotus?

Burn the bug with Firebug

If any of web developer who have not install Firebug, download it now. It's a look you will say "How can I live without that". The beta 1.0 have a lot of improvement especially on the javascript debugging. Check it out.

Using Java in Lotus

I haven't been updating this site as often as I want too but work have been keeping me really busy.
My friend was asking why should he (Domino Developer) learn up Java? Basically for Lotus Notes application, it is quite sufficient to keep to Lotus Script and Formula. There are lots of advise why should we learn up Java but I'm not going to go into that here. I give let him know that the skill may come useful sometime even in Lotus Notes application. It would be good to branch out a little too.

So for the Lotus Notes application example, I gave him the link to a post I had sometime back in my earlier blog. The example show how you can use a Java image library to get property out of attached image files. I couldn't find any way of doing it in LotusScript (drop me a line if you know of a way). Check out the example here. At least he agreed that there are some use of Java in Lotus Notes application development.

Efficient JavaScript

For anyone who does web development, this article "Efficient JavaScript" is a good read from Dev.Opera.

Client User Interface on Web: Preview pane on web

I finally get some time to sit down and do an example of a very simple application with dojo. I've created a split vertical pane. The top pane will display the view and the bottom pane (preview) will display the form (edit and saving).

You can download the example here. Remember to sign the database first.

First setup where you store your dojo library. Open the profile document from the menu "Action --> Edit Profile".



Enter the path of the dojo.js. for eg "/WebTool/Dojo.nsf/dojo-0.3.1/dojo.js". Here I store dojo in a nsf template. You can also store it directly at the Domino server HTML directory.

First the view. I used SortableTable. The view (hvPerson) generates the html table body. $$ViewTemplate is use to create the rest of the table for the SortableTable. In each row, the document unique id is inserted in the <td> tag as a value. This will be use to retrieve the selected document from the table.



The "Create" button will retrieve the form (dfPerson). Domino form will create the full HTML source by default. So when it is retrieved, we only need the Form portion to be display in the preview area.



When saving the form, we can directly use the form action for submission. Just pass in the form to dojo.io.bind and it will handle the submission. This is the same when saving a existing form. The best part is, even the WebQuerySave works. So this is really a convenient function to use.

I have just touch the surface of how "Client" like application can be built on the browser. To those dojo guru out there appreciate if you could feedback on the code used here. I put together the this sample application referring to the dojo demo application and responses from this forum.
Download the sample and try it out.

Show-n-Tell Thursday