Lets take a look at the new in IT this week that caught the attention of us at Red Pill Development.
Events
The anticipation is building for IBM Connect 2014. Many members of the communities have offered great tips for getting the most out of the event. This includes a great series of tweets by @wesmorgan1. Red Pill Development is offering the Red Pill Challenge for companies wanting to see modernization of Notes applications first hand.
Other great user group events will follow in 2014, many of which will have name changes. BLUG is now Engage, UKLUG is now Icon UK, IAMLUG is now Icon US, and AUSLUG is now Inform. The Atlanta Group will be adding a new annual event to the calendar in April but has decided to retain the name ATLUG. Red Pill Development is involved in the planning for the ATLUG event which is looking to provide a new slant to the traditional user group format. Stay tuned for news.
Going Mobile
Mobile devices continue to grow as does the use of mobile applications. Management of mobile applications presents a new challenge for organizations as they move from a few pilot applications to a much larger portfolio. Red Pill Development base seen these challenges coming and forms an integral part of its Asymmetric approach to modernization.
In other important news, we are seeing the effort of popular browsers to narrow the performance gap between browser solutions and native mobile applications. Each approach has its own unique advantages. In the pas most Note mobile development has been we-based using Xpages Mobile, jQuery Mobile, and Kendo UI, but in recent months we have seen a growing interest in rich client solutions using Titanium, Phone Gap etc.
Perhaps the biggest news of the week was the announcement that Google will acquire home device innovator Nest. Red Pill Development has been following Nest recently as an innovator in the market so we will be watching closely to see how Google uses Nest to add a Google slant on the Internet of Things.
Going Social
Going Responsive
The interest in Java within the Notes community continues to grow with a large number of technical articles and webinars conducted during the week. In key Java news, Oracle announced the planned release of Java 8 in March. As with most XPages technologies it is unclear how long the wait will before the latest language features become available to Domino developers. Delays in gaining access to the latest technology is a major challenge for Domino development as the development environment does not make use of the latest versions of Java, JSF, Eclipse, Dojo etc. Perhaps Connect 2014 will announce plans to narrow some of those gaps.
Open Source
The backlash against the overreach of the NSA is having some interesting consequences. One of these is the attractiveness of open source code which allows organizations to scrutinize the source code looking for potential backdoors for unwanted snooping. This week we even saw the announcement of a potential open source laptop.
OpenNTF recently announced OpenNTF Essentials. A collection of XPages solutions designed to kick start XPages development. Deployed via OSGI Plug-ins, interest has grown in the XPages community for converting custom controls into components suitable for deployment as art of Essentials. This week we saw the announcement that the popular Debug Toolbar has been converted to a plug-in, and we assume will soon become part of Essentials.
