As far as UI goes, it is a bit awkward. Much like Office one. Also, it is not intuitive how to create a web site. I found Emtpy web site under Site from template option. However, this is just a small bump up the road. The fact that there are so many usable features like site report and easy database management and possibility of importing projects like WordPress and Drupal just proves that this is a serious start-up product. And on top of it it is free (yes, like beer).

Anyway… more info can be located on their official website. I suggest you give it a go.

Remember how you traversed a string in C? Typically you wrote something like this (and yes, I know I probably should have used a pointer):

char pszString[100] = "My silly string\0";
for (int i=0; i<strlen(pszString); i++) {
   char ch = pszString[i];
   //do something spiffy
}

As far as I remember, I use that all the time in JavaScript as well. I never had any issues. Guess what? In IE on VM that was the cause of my problems. So, all I had to do was:

var pszString = new String("My silly string");
for (int i=0; i<strlen(pszString); i++) {
   char ch = pszString.substr(i, 1);
   //do something spiffy
}

And the stuff magically started to work.

In LotusScript, consuming web services is plain easy. You just import the WSDL, which can be located either on your file system or directly on the web and you are good to go.

Sounds too good to be true? It is. There are couple of limitations, that will make you swear like a gypsy on a bad day.

1. Variables and function names must not be longer than 46 characters.
2. There is no way in hell your code will know how to process an array, that was passed as a result.

Don’t get me wrong. This is most certainly not a problem when Web service itself is pretty simple. However, it becomes an annoyance when you start using complex 3rd party Web services.

How to get around those?

For 3rd party services, I guess it depends from case to case. For one web service, we actually had to come up with adapter web service written in C#, that would translate interfaces needed to something that could be used in LotusScript. I guess we could have used Java, but that caused some memory leaks.

If you are doing your own service, just make sure, that you don’t return any arrays and that your variables are according to the consensus of LotusScript and youa re good to go.

Stackoverflow doesn’t know all the answers. Far from it. However, it is used by so many great developers that there is bound to be someone that knows how to answer your question(s). Voting mechanism is similar to the one at IdeaJam and makes sure that good questions and good answers are always at the top. And it is FREE. Really, the best thing to do is to go and check for yourself.

Until IE steps into the picture. I don’t know if the same behaviour is in IE 8 as well, but IE 7 definitely has issues with AJAX requests. If URL of request doesn’t change, IE caches the result and passes it back to you. This wouldn’t be a problem if you would actually expect to see the same result each and every time. However, in our case, where it is desired that DYK section is not always the same, this is kind of annoying.

To sort out our issues, we just added a random number to the request. This number is changed to new random value each and every time the request is processed.

However, while presenting my newest work to a customer, reality hit me hard. The page displayed without styling in Safari (4.0.3 531.9.1) and Chrome (3.0.195.21) browsers. I went to investigate. After some time, I removed @Charset command from all CSS files. That fixed the problem but still made me look weird.

So until further ado, I’ll avoid using @Charset command in CSS. I advise you do the same.

In recent years, I had pleasure (yes, let’s call it pleasure) of working with several web designers. I also had pleasure of observing the latest stuff made by web designers on the net. I am yet to find a single designer that thought about people with disabilities. And I am not talking about heavy disability either. Not every one of us is young with perfect sight. Many people have problems with high resolutions, and even distinguishing colours. And we are not that old as well. Take WordPress theme I am using atm. Enhance fonts. You see what happened with tabs and search box? Yeah. But it looks nice in normal size. Right?

The funny thing though. I always pointed out the problem to designers. Nobody cared, but insisted the design stays as is. And I don’t even want to start explaining how much clutter do you need to add to HTML code to make fields rounded and expendable. Sure, you could do it using Javascript and perhaps this is the way to go anyway. But enough of that.

It is more than obvious that some don’t get the importance of great looking float-able, accessible and useful designs. And that is not OK. And it is not only a design issue as well. There is about 10% of people with some sort of optical problems. So 10% of all users will, in worst case, see your site distorted, or find it unusable. Excellent. Specially, if those are your customers.

Building web page as designer drew it is just not enough. Web sites that don’t scale are behind an era we are living now and in best case annoying to people with sight issues. So, use techniques that are available nowadays (and when CSS3 finally gets support it deserves, we all will be happy hypos) and don’t forget that you don’t represent everyone.

Writing HTML, CSS and JS for all those rounded buttons was fiddly, not to mention time consuming. The answer from designer: “You don’t need the design to float, scale, etc.”

Right. I will be covering that methodology (or wrongness of it) in one of my next posts. I just hope CSS3 support grows by 1000% in next week. Yeah, wishful thinking.

What to do?

A first thing that I always thought of was z-indexes. Only one problem there. Z-index doesn’t work in Internet Explorer in this case. But how can it be solved?

There is an attribute you can set for embedded objects called wmode. If this attribute contains value of transparent, you will force embedded object to display behind the absolute positioned one.

Example:

<embed width="465" height="285"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="myflashanimation.swf"
style="" name="movie_player" quality="high"
allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" flashvars=""
wmode="transparent" id="movie_player"/>

Not a good idea. I don’t know, when was the last time, someone at IBM took a look at their rendering engine, but this just isn’t it. Unordered lists don’t close, leading to a total mess of your layout. On numerous occasions, a div tag marked as pass through text got put to the bottom of contents and not at the spot where it was in the body field, leading to some more confusion. And what killed it for me was a sudden br tag flood in the HTML for no apparent reason. All 6 of them were gone when text was put in the same line as pass through text and appeared right after I put the text back in new line. And all of this appeared randomly, which amused me for a while.

So, I guess it is no wonder, why there are so many CMS application in Notes, where content needs to be entered as HTML. However, in my experience, you as a developer or admin of such system can be glad if a content editor knows how to use Lotus Notes.