Developers, Developers, Developers!

Software developers are always seeking to take advantage of the best of new approaches, tools, techniques and languages. Many come and go, but some have a lengthy lifespan. Domino’s built-in languages of @Formula and LotusScript are pretty obscure these days, mainly because they only exist in the Domino world. Yes, Domino has Java too, but even with that there are some hoops to jump through and some non-standard techniques to grapple with.

Modern environments, in particular the MEAN stack, are taking over as mainstream and very popular tools. Why not take advantage of these skills and opportunities? Moving your Domino data to LDC Via will open it up to all these new worlds, and grant access to a new generation of developers.

Tell us what your organisation’s development strategy is: if we don’t already have sample code for you, we’ll write some.

(And if you’re writing your own apps for Via, don’t forget our API documentation!)

Free full-text search for all!

We’ve mentioned before how important we think full-text search is as a feature. Well, we’re happy to announce that even free accounts can now make use of our full-text search functionality.

Once you’ve imported or created a database in Via, it’s simply a case of going to the Database Settings screen and ticking the “Indexed” check-box.

If you’re writing your own applications to access data in Via, then our API documentation is invaluable for putting together those powerful full-text queries.

Also, bear in mind that for maximum flexibility you can combine full-text queries with our pre-existing structured query syntax. Happy searching!

Developing web applications with LDC Via

Back in January we hosted a webinar where we talked about the basics of LDC Via: how to migrate data and use our templates. If you wish to refresh your memory, that’s available up on YouTube: LDC Via Webinar.

Time marches on, and we wanted to put together a second webinar, this time focusing on developers!

Two weeks ago we ran this, Developing web applications with LDC Via, which was loosely-based on some content we first presented at Engage this year. The session was popular, but a lot of people still missed it, and we had some audio issues too. As a result, we repeated the session last Wednesday, and the recording is available on our YouTube channel:

Developing web applications with LDC Via.

During this session we talk about modern web application development using REST services. There are demonstrations from both the client- and server-side: React.js for some client code consuming the LDC Via API, and also the Java framework Vaadin on the server, together with a node.js / Express application too.

Take a look at the session—there’s a lot of content in there—and if you want to dive into LDC Via you can review API documentation on-line, and we have plenty of sample code in our GitHub repository.

Our next webinar

Earlier in the year we hosted a webinar where we talked about the basics of LDC Via: how to migrate data and use our templates. You can watch that video here. But now it’s on to the next topic, and that is going to be developing applications using LDC Via as a back end.

We’re going to talk about modern web application development using REST services. So, we’ll show you demos of developing an application that works with LDC Via data using React, but then we’ll show you how to do exactly the same thing using node.js, and then the same again with Vaadin. We’re going to be talking fast, but hopefully you’re going to learn a lot.

So set the date in your diary: Wednesday April 6th at 4pm UK time. You can sign up here.

Who exactly are you?

We’ve always been keen to make it as easy as possible for you, as a developer, to get authenticated against our API. This is why we used a simple API Key model. We had feedback from some developers that they would prefer us to allow a more traditional session cookie approach to authentication.

In our most recent version of LDC Via, we’ve enabled just that. There are now two different ways that you can authenticate your users against our services. You can continue to use the API Key if that suits your need. But you can also now use a session cookie.

You get allocated the cookie quite simply. You just post the username and password of the user to our service and we return a session cookie if it is valid. Then, whenever you make another request against our services you have to pass the session cookie back to our servers. If the cookie is still valid then we will perform the operation. It’s all documented in our API page.

The use-case for this is most likely to be client-side JavaScript applications using, for example, jQuery or AngularJS. You may be aware that Ajax is not designed to pass cookies to remote servers. So we had to make some changes to our servers (that’s all done, don’t worry), but you’ll also need to make some changes in your code. In jQuery you’ll want to use the “xhrFields -> withCredentials” setting. And in AngularJS you would, similarly, set the withCredentials property to true on your $.ajax requests.

This is just one example of adding features to LDC Via because you, our users, want them. If you have ideas for improving LDC Via, please do contact us.