Lotus Notes Resources

Unfortunately, if you're a Lotus Notes developer StackOverflow doesn't typically have the answer and user base to answer your question. There are, however, two standard places to find what you're looking for. The Lotus Notes Forums ( Lotus Notes 8 Forum, Lotus Notes 6 & 7 Forum ) on the IBM website. They aren't readily apparent on the IBM website and if you think about it, the answer becomes clear.

Remember the video of Steve Ballmer leading the "developers, developers, developers" chant? Microsoft made it clear that it is focused on winning over developers. IBM, on the other hand, is mainly focused on winning over managers (or those with the purse strings).

I don't point that out to make either party look bad, but it does give us an idea of where we'll need to look when searching for resources and tutorials to find out how to best use the tools at our disposal.

All that said, the forums are a great place to find answer to Lotus Notes persistent questions:

• Lotus Notes 8 Forum
• Lotus Notes 6 & 7 Forum

Xpages Resources and Tutorials

The absolute best resource for learning XPages is the demonstration example, which can be found here (http://208.85.190.65/demos/demoapp.nsf). XPages heavily uses the Dojo toolkit ( http://dojotoolkit.org/ ), which is much like jQuery (similar concepts, same ideas; use XMLHttpRequest to drive your application).

Still, it doesn't address the main problem with XPages, which is the poor user authentication process. You can't just use the Lotus Notes account to authenticate. You have to set the Internet Password settings in every individual user account. A very tedious process if you didn't start off from the beginning using internet settings. Even in the Lotus Notes web browser it can't authenticate.

There are ways around this using Tivoli (free if you are licensed for Domino Server) or some other user account management program and as always you could write your own and reinvent the wheel.

However, if you can't answer the authentication problem, then you won't get the most out of XPages.