What this book covers

Topics in these chapters offer tips, suggestions, and code snippets to help you understand and resolve specific problems you may encounter when working with Domino applications for the Web. You will likely encounter problems not covered within these pages, but the tips provided here should save you some puzzlement, aggravation, and research time.

Many techniques covered in these pages are now referred to by the Domino community as "classic" or "traditional" web development techniques. Not covered here are XPages and other development strategies that were introduced in Domino 8.5 and later. If you need such information, you must seek it elsewhere.

My overarching intent was to bring together in one place some useful tips and techniques that are otherwise scattered across the Web. Ideas offered here derive from experience, mine and others. Code samples are for illustration only and should not be interpreted as a guarantee of performance or suitability for a specific situation. Everything covered should be useful for versions of Domino 6.5 and later. Domino Designer 8.0 was used to develop and verify all the sample code.

Keep in mind that there are often several ways to create a feature or to solve a problem. While classic techniques work with current and older versions of Domino, the preferred way to create new applications is to use the latest techniques such as XPages. However, even in an up-to-date Domino environment, it may not be practical to redesign an existing application to take advantage of them. If you cannot take advantage of those newer techniques for whatever reason, then certainly use techniques catalogued in this volume. Use what makes sense to you and what works for you. Test thoroughly.

Chapter 1, Preparation and Habits, provides suggestions for developers seeking to improve their knowledge, skill, and productivity. Issues related to executing development projects are discussed.

Chapter 2, Design and Development Strategies, provides recommendations for planning development projects and for developing applications.

Chapter 3, Form and Pages, illustrates selected design choices related to forms and pages, including properties, composing and saving documents, improving layout, using view templates, incorporating HTML tags, and using hidden fields and computed text.

Chapter 4, Navigation, illustrates selected navigational strategies, including application launch options, custom login forms, menus, default error pages, and providing direction and help.

Chapter 5, Cascading Style Sheets, illustrates how CSS rules can be incorporated into applications to style forms and pages for the Web.

Chapter 6, JavaScript, illustrates how client-side JavaScript can be incorporated into applications for such purposes as validating fields, changing element style, enabling a date picker, providing a warning before leaving a form if changed data has not been saved, and retrieving data with Ajax.

Chapter 7, Views, illustrates design choices for displaying views on the Web.

Chapter 8, Agents, illustrates how to incorporate agents in web applications, including setting properties and security, adding error traps, accessing documents, processing selected documents in a view, sending e-mail notifications, and extracting data to a spreadsheet.

Chapter 9, Security and Performance, discusses security planning, implementing security features, tracking document changes, and designing for good performance.

Chapter 10, Testing and Debugging, discusses testing strategies, test plans, tracking issues, and selected debugging techniques.