This year was my busiest year yet at Connect with 6 hours total on stage, and as there is a good chance that technical content will be cut from next years conference these might be my last presentations there, so enjoy
Take a whirlwind tour of the many ways in which Java can make your life better as a developer. We’ll use Java in IBM Notes, Eclipse, and the latest IDEs. And we’ll show you examples of best of breed libraries that can analyze data, create PDFs, and perform image processing on the fly. Get connected to IBM Connections, access relational data, open sockets, and parse feeds. And along the way we’ll throw in tips for testing, performance, and writing good code.
#####SHOW303 – Proper Connections Development for Proper Domino Developers (with [Matt White](http://mattwhite.me/))
_Tuesday | 10:30-12:15 | Swan Osprey_
This is a session with a mission: to take a much loved IBM Domino app and deploy it to a client’s new IBM Connections environment. We’ll show different solutions such as the use of iWidgets or creating a REST API to make the application available to IBM Connections users and walk you through the process, from beginning to end. If you’re an IBM Domino developer who knows nothing about IBM Connections, this is the session for you.
So I’m back from Connections 2014 and Ignoring a terrible case of the IBM Connect flu (which has been upgraded to include vomiting and diarrhoea) the event has been a great success
The previous 2 years of LotusSphere and IBM connection have been more than a little depressed and to a certain extent ‘desperate’ feeling, this year it felt much different, not the happy go Lucky ‘lets have a party’ of older Lotuspheres, but a heads down lets do some work feeling.
I ended up making far more contacts and having far more business conversations than in previous years, which has ended with the best set of business leads to be got from the conference in many a year. If I was honest this is largely due to the assistance provided to me by The turtle partnership and other members of LDC, which made my skill set perfectly timed for IBMs current focus.
IBM have re-badged us “Connections Developers” when what they really mean is ‘Web sphere Developers’, it’s what they have wanted us to be for years with little success and at last they have found a way to sell it to us without a revolt, this is fine by me as I had already started the transition, but it is a little bit ‘marketing’
The scheduling sucked, sorry but it did, people found lots of sessions with similar subjects matched against each other, there are tracks for a reason people!!, if you are a developer you should be able to follow the developer track without constantly deciding which developer sessions you can attend due to there being 3 on at once.
The social side of the conference was excellently done with Veronica Belmont (who’s autograph I got) providing a professional touch, plenty of things for people to do and the placement of the social cafe was just right as it provided a excellent amount of foot fall though the vendor area (always a good idea)
There were some indication that IBM is tightening the purse strings, such as the lack of entertainment at the party and there only being 4 rides open at the fairground trip, but that was compensated by none of the messing about with speaker tickets that we had last year, mind you as I was working neither worried me, but I might have cared if had paid 2k for a ticket.
My habit of walking though a crowd just listening in order to get a feel for it revealed a surprising large amount of Germanic and eastern European languages and quite a lot of Japanese, far more than I remember in previous years, perhaps market areas to pay attention to in the next year. Hmmmmmm
Conclusion: A good conference all round, and other than the scheduling, well done, if IBM can repeat it next year then I will be there, but if only 30% of the rumours of changes are true, it might only be a conference for management and HR staff, who tend not to ask difficult questions about technical products.
Right!! I’m just getting on the plane for Connect 2014, and I am on a mission the meet everyone that I know and make a few new friends, if I keep missing you, please find me 🙂
All the smart Notes/Domino and Connections people I know have multiple arrows to their quiver. All the way from Salesforce though node.js to hard and dark programming and high availability admin on totally none IBM technologies, and while we whisper this knowledge to each other we never really present on it or yell it to the wider world, so when some of these said people introduced the following idea to me, I nearly bit the top off my can of Red Bull in excitement.
Collaboration Stack Community Networking Event
Do you work with collaboration platforms? Meet your peers at an informal, technical get-together. Whilst making valuable new contacts, you can share ideas, debate best practice and explore emerging technologies.
March 21st – London
Somewhere we can talk about all forms of collaboration, from the Biggest project Like IBM’s down to Kickstarter projects based on open source
We are just setting up and searching for more speakers that will present on subjects that leave you stunned and needing a stiff drink.
So if you have something that you have been inching to tell the world about see any member of LDC or The Turtle Partnership
This year is going to be my most hectic to date, with 3 sessions, 2 of which are show ‘n’ tells including my first session with fellow LDC’erMatt White, a pant wetting 5 hours presenting.
Take a whirlwind tour of the many ways in which Java can make your life better as a developer. We’ll use Java in IBM Notes, Eclipse, and the latest IDEs. And we’ll show you examples of best of breed libraries that can analyze data, create PDFs, and perform image processing on the fly. Get connected to IBM Connections, access relational data, open sockets, and parse feeds. And along the way we’ll throw in tips for testing, performance, and writing good code.
SHOW303 – Proper Connections Development for Proper Domino Developers (with Matt White)
Tuesday | 10:30-12:15 | Swan Osprey
This is a session with a mission: to take a much loved IBM Domino app and deploy it to a client’s new IBM Connections environment. We’ll show different solutions such as the use of iWidgets or creating a REST API to make the application available to IBM Connections users and walk you through the process, from beginning to end. If you’re an IBM Domino developer who knows nothing about IBM Connections, this is the session for you.
Socialbizug.org has evolved to provide a dynamic home for ICS communities and content. It was designed by WIS, hosted by Connectria, built by The Turtle Partnership and developed by The London Developer Co-Op on a combination of IBM Connections and IBM Domino. Attend to see how to pick the right pieces for a successful IBM Connections end user facing deployment. Take a behind the scenes look at the site, from the ground up. We will start from customer design requirements, including both anonymous and secured content. Then dig into server architecture design including the number of servers, staging areas and growth planning. Finally we’ll talk about development decisions as well as server scaling and ease of management in our cloud model.
