Beyond The Yellow Bubble

Week 2 of xpages kindergarten has started on a much sounder footing than week 1.  Still finding heaps of cool things and a few not so cool things....

The Good - Custom Controls:  The coolest thing I have found so far about xpages is in 8.5.1 so we will have to wait.  The 2nd coolest thing I have found so far is custom controls.  These things are absolutely awesome.  Think of the like subforms on steroids.  They are way cooler than subforms for the following key reasons:-

1. An xpage can provide the functionality of a form, view, and page.  So in some ways a custom control is also like hiving a "subview" or "subpage.", a way to define a common set of visual elements that can be included on a group or all design elements in your application.  Do you have a set of actions you would like to make available on all (or some) of your views then think custom control.
2. Unlike subforms, it is possible to include the same custom control more than once inside the one xpage or custom control.  This is a characteristic that is especially useful when using the repeater control (another day).
3. The really cool thing  about custom controls is that you can define parameters that are passed from the parent object (xpage or custom control ).  This allows the custom control to modify its behavior based upon information passed in from above.  Think now about having a super-control in place of a number of less powerful controls.  Just like widgets, plug-ins etc, xpage developers are going to be building and sharing all manner of custom controls that will allow generic functionality to implemented with a simple drag/drop.

I expoect the use of custom controls will very greatly.  Just like LotusScript and subforms today we will have unstructured developers who do not use them at all and we will have structured developers (e.g. OOP) that will create xpages that consist almost entirely of custom controls whose behavior is controlled via parameters.

The Bad: Screen Hog: Xpages are a real screen hog when they are loaded in the new DDE.  There is so much information contained on an Xpage that IBM gives us a total of nine panels that we can use to manage their design.  On the left we have the traditional bookmarks for databases and design elements.  Below that is a new outline panel.  In the middle we have the xpage code itself which is shown in design and source format.  below this are three panels showing Properties, Events, and Problems (another day).  To the right we have our controls toolbox and a Data Source panel.  Even then the properties box often tries to display more information than will fit in the space allocated so I find myself wanting to resize the window to avoid the need to scroll.  This makes my xpage even smaller.

On a typical SXGA monitor (1280x1024) the amount of space left to show the xpage is probably less than 50% of the total space.  On an XGA monitor (1024x768) it is even less.  If you find yourself doing a lot of xpage design and you don't yet have a high resolution monitor I expect you will soon be demanding one.  I went all the way and purchased a 30" wide-screen monitor at home.  I can justify it to myself (and my wife) because it is a huge productivity aid when developing xpages in particular,