1000th XPages document

A couple of days I tweeted that we were 10 documents away from one thousand XPages related document in our XPages knowledge database:

Well today I entered the 1000th document so I was thinking about sharing some analytics from the database…

Introduction

The database was created in July 2009, so a bit before 2011, the year XPages established itself truly. Documents have different meta data such as:

• Title
• Functional area
• XPage related element
• Type
• Level
• Information Source
• Date
• Rating

Some examples of functional areas are: calendaring, views, error management, drag-n-drop, expression language, performance, charting, mobile, themes etcetera.

Types can be blogposts, presentations, education (course material), tech-notes, videos etcetera.

As level you can select beginner, intermediate and expert. Beginner focuses on core functions, intermediate is mostly about programming in XPages or extending core functionality and expert can be about DDE, perspectives, JAVA etcetera.

The documents are listed in different views that categorize them on the different meta-tags.

The database is by the way a pure Notes database, mostly because the ease of copy and paste in rich text. The database also started first as a personal data storage facility but was opened after a while for the whole of the organization. So a pure Notes solution minimized the required initial development time.

Documents can be searched via the view search and there is a search form.

 

Data analysis

Oldest & Newest document

The ‘oldest’ document is from Thomas Peisel and Azadeh Salehi and is a presentation from Lotusphere 2008: ‘HND 102: IBM Lotus Domino Designer in Eclipse: Create and Work with XPages Hands On’ (people having flashbacks?).

The ‘newest’ document is from Mark Rodin ‘jQuery in XPages #1 – Highcharts‘.

Popular functions

1. general 240
2. programming 131
3. views 59
4. javascript 32
5. data binding 29
6. error management 26

Popular types

• blog-post 607
• tech-note 123
• tutorial 105

Levels

• beginner 442
• intermediate 428
• expert 116

Most active sources

• domino designer wiki 172 (obvious)
• internal documentation 71
• qtzar 70
• xpagesblog 56
• dontpanic82 36
• dominoguru 28

Of course thanks to you all who write and present on XPages!

Visits

Last week we had 30 visits. Last month there were 93 visits. We see the numbers rising slowly since more developers are adapting XPages technology.

Remarkably we see a lot of consultants accessing the database, I assume they should be more eager to learn and sell new skills?

Conclusion

So has the database been a success? I believe it is (or getting).  The database was set up in the days there was almost no documentation or books on XPages. After adding and reading a 1000 documents on XPages my personal technology skill on it has gone from a new-bee to at least an intermediate.

I also see and hear developers coming with ‘wilder’ ideas on developing more advanced solutions. The fact that you can ‘borrow’ ideas / work from others via custom controls is a great advantage in XPages. I do not know how other organizations educate their developers on XPages but besides this database we have had several workshops on XPages that helped developers to look at it.

I also see that the Extension Library full fills a gap in XPages application development, where new controls deliver ‘expected’ functionality or ‘unexpected’ functionality in a rapid application development environment. Unfortunately the  documentation or guidance for the library is lacking but there is a book on the way, so I assume also more blog-posts.

Wishlist

Do I have wishes on XPages education? Of course I do! A manual on the Extension Library would be great plus. Especially for the next version of the Upgrade Pack (v2) including the social stuff it would be nice if IBM could deliver the package and the manual at the same time.

I would also like to read more tutorials on Java development in XPages, or how to get started with it. For now I can manage myself with SSJS but I can see the advantages of using JAVA in XPages.

But my biggest wish is that everybody continues to write or start writing on XPages 🙂