Yes, I will be at LotuSphere in '07. Not as a speaker or anything, but as a regular attendee. This will be the first time I've been at LotuSphere since '02. The first time I attended LotuSphere was way back in 1997, so the pattern seems to be that I only attend at five-year intervals. (A five-year itch?) When I went back in '02, that was when JSP support for Domino was pulled in favor of...nothing. Well, almost nothing. Sure, IBM/Lotus tried their best to spin the decision to pull what would have been an awesome addition to the product, saying that Lotus Notes has a role in J2EE as a datastore, and there was a JSP tag library and the IBM Toolkit for Lotus Domino, but in the end, it was all smoke and mirrors. How many Notes developers have actually created servlets or JSPs that interact directly with the Domino objects? My guess it is few and far between.

But enough of my ranting. I am definitely looking forward to attending next year. I'm still curious (dubious) as to whether IBM/Lotus can pull off this Hannover thing for Notes 8.0. Regardless, keep an eye out for me and I'll buy you a beer if you tell me how huge a fan you are of my blog! ; + )

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Here are my impressions of the sessions I saw this afternoon:

AJAX Fundamentals for Web Development - Scott Good

This presentation provided background material on how to use AJAX to provide seamless client-server interaction in a web site by using the XMLHTTPRequest object and the JavaScript innerHTML property. Unfortunately, several weeks ago, I read all of Scott's and 11tmr's weblogs on how to implement a Web Nab Picker using AJAX, so I was already familiar with just about everything Scott discussed. No matter, Scott did a great job engaging the audience and even garnered applause as well as several laughs. I can definitely learn a lot about presenting from him.

Advanced AJAX for Domino Developers - Viktor Krantz

Viktor provided more definition as to what AJAX is, and what it can do. A common misconception he discussed is that AJAX can be synchronous as well as asynchronous, and reasons why you'd want to do one over the other. He also showed how AJAX doesn't need to retrieve an XML document all the time. JSON also leverages the use of the XMLHTTPRequest object to bring back essentially pure text from a web request and format it into either an object, an array, an array of objects, an object of arrays, and so on. He also demoed some code that SNAPPS created that creates a dynamic calendar that can be based on either one or multiple calendars. Way cool. I can see how I could use this to solve more than one client need I've heard about recently. I asked Rob Novak why he's giving this code away. He said that it makes more sense to give it away than to try to sell it to a few customers and essentially get minimal press over their available Notes/Domino expertise. I can see his point. Kudos to SNAPPS for giving this valuable resource to the Notes/Domino community!

The Consumer Side of Domino 7 Web Services - Rob Novak

Rob demonstrated the many different ways to consume (or invoke) a Domino Web service, including:

Notes client

WebSphere Portal - via a portlet

Rational Application Developer

MS Word - via the Microsoft Office 2003 Web Services Toolkit v2.01

Yahoo! Widget

Mobile Devices

Since I haven't been able to cross-over to the WebSphere/Rational side of things yet, the Notes/Office methods were the most interesting to me. Of course, the Microsoft way requires that every computer invoking the web service have the aforementioned toolkit installed--damn you, Microsoft!

This session was sparsely attended, which was surprising but not a complete surprise. With the conference winding down, I figure most people were taking the time to go to the strip one last time, or buy souvenirs, or whatever. All in all, a very good presentation.

Deborah and I had lunch with Chris Byrne and Devin Olson, which turned out to be one of most entertaining lunch we had during the conference. Folks that passed by Chris' table don't know what they were missing. Devin has also written articles for the Advisor. He also worked for InfoImage back when they were the world's largest Lotus Business Partner. Those of you who are familiar with your Lotus history probably know this story already. InfoImage was convinced by Microsoft to forgo their Lotus heritage and instead take $25 mil in seed money to develop new and interesting stuff for Microsoft. Within twelve months, InfoImage's total offices were a third of what they were previously. With eighteen months, InfoImage was caput. Devin said that some of the code written by InfoImage back in 2000 has made its way into Sharepoint, so I guess Microsoft is good at recycling, if anything. (Devin, please correct me if I have erred in the timeline or any of the details!)

I have a similar story from my days with Superior Consultant. Enterprise Consulting, one of Superior's divisions, was offered a bag of money back in early '99 to convert its website to Frontpage and internal e-mail to Exchange. Additionally, Superior would be charged with converting its consulting staff to experts in ActiveX for Healthcare. This whole insane enterprise was announced at Superior's annual meeting in May '99. Seeing the writing on the wall, I left for NuTechs in August '99. Superior went from a growing consulting firm in the healthcare industry, with a division that had just one the Best Business Impact award at LotuSphere, to a company roughly 1/4 the size. But the top Superior brass got their bribe money and made off like bandits, so who cares if 1,000+ people lost their jobs as a direct result of management hubris? But I digress. Anyway, Devin also mentioned the Advisor DevCon back in '98, which I'd also attended. He mentioned how one of InfoImage's more comely employees helped them pilfer a pile of free drink tickets from a distracted barkeep. The free drinks made the ensuing polo exhibition much more entertaining, from what I heard. (I actually missed all of this. Two co-workers of mine from Superior and I went to downtown Palm Springs to gamble the night away with some senior citizens. What were we thinking?!?) Devin also mentioned that he was considering relocating from Phoenix to Grand Rapids Michigan. My wife and I let him know that he would be in the minory of people who have intentionally moved to Michigan, as the equivalent of a busload of people every day leave Michigan, likely never to return. But, Grand Rapids is a very nice part of Michigan to live in, and they could use some of the character Devin brings!

My wife and I said good-by to Chris and Devin so we could get ready for the rest of today's travels...

(1)

Here are my impressions of the sessions I saw this afternoon:

Workplace Designer for Domino Developers - Rob Novak

I've seen slides and demos of Workplace Designer before (notably at the demo given by Ed Wrenbeck at the DNP DominoFest held on 4/12/05), but this session gave me the most in-depth look at this product to date. Now at version number 2.6, its definitely beginning to look more like a working product. However, I have some concerns about how it will be embraced by the Notes/Domino developer community. For starters, it consumes well over a gig of RAM when running. I don't know about you, but I'm assuming that most folks don't have laptops with that much RAM, or the capacity to use that much RAM. Second, being able to do development when disconnected seems to be a chore. I know, this is the age of DSL and Broadband and cable modems, but I hate the idea of needing to be connected all the time in order to be able to do any development or troubleshooting when away from my office network. Third, the skills needed to develop in this product are considerable. Not only do you need to know JavaScript, but also XML, XPATH, XSD (schemas), and how either Workplace Collaborative Services or Workplace Services Express work. In my opinion, many developers who've only developed applications for the Notes client will not be able to develop in this platform without considerable training. Here's hoping that when v3.0 is released sometime next year, the product will be much easier to develop applications with than it is today. (A side note: the presenter, while having one year of experience with the product, has not developed any production applications for customers yet. Take that however you want.)

Lotus Notes-to-Web: Advanced Web Development - Scott Good

I always enjoy watching Scott give a presentation. His energy is contagious, and you can really tell that he enjoys what he does for a living. Scott presented for the DNP back on 8/28/02, and I'm thinking I have to find a way to get him to speak for me again. I wonder what his favorite beer is...

Anyway, Scott gave an excellent presentation, as always. If you're a Lotus Advisor subscriber, you've probably read the countless articles he's written for them over the years. Most of the techniques he covered I'd already read in the magazine, but it was good to get a refresher course on some things I'd forgotten about, like using the onKeyPress event for JavaScript input validation. We also had an interesting discussion on the use of the innerHTML property, something which is not part of the DOM but can be extremely useful for creating DHTML pages. Scott also covered the use of iFrames, something which I hadn't used before and which seems to have been eclipsed by AJAX. He also went over the difference between a CSS "id" and a "class". An id must be unique to the page, while a class can be used multiple times. I'm planning on seeing Scott's AJAX presentations tomorrow, and I'm expecting them to be very interesting.

The Server Side of Domino 7 Web Services - James Ray

James faced the same challenge I did in my XML presentation: how to present a new (and large) topic in an hour. He did an excellent job giving a primer to what web services are all about, and his sample code was very thorough and could be used by anyone running ND7 in their environment right now. He got caught going into the weeds when trying to explain web services security, or lack thereof. Again, if this session had been broken out into two presentations (beginner and advanced), he would have had more than enough time to get into this particular aspect of web services. Unfortunately, when it came time to give his final demo, debugging a Domino web service using RAD Web Services Debugger, he couldn't quite get it to work. However, I really appreciated knowing that this capability is available within RAD, and is also well documented in the Domino Designer. Great job, James!

(42)

Well, today's the big day. I'm giving both of my presentations this afternoon, one at 1:30 PM and the other at 4:45 PM. For the one @ 1:30 PM, I'll try not to throw the mini Lifesaver rolls at people I catch nodding off. I anticipate a small turnout for the second presentation, as most people will probably be wore-out after eight hours of presentations, and will probably want to freshen up before the welcome reception.

I caught Kevin Cavanaugh's keynote presentation on Expanding the Definition of Collaboration with Lotus Notes Hannover . The slides were directly from LotuSphere, but Kevin did a good job of relaying the information. The latter third of the presentation dealt with how to make what's being referred to as "composite applications". I don't know what the other attendees were thinking, but all of the slides about the WSDL files you need to create to make it work left me cold. I'm hoping that Lotus will make doing this much easier than it looks now, otherwise I can't see many Lotus customers going through all of the trouble. Another think I'm surprised, but then not surprised about, is the big footprint that Hannover requires. 512 MB of RAM is a bit much for a Notes client. Now, I know that the next version of Notes is based on Eclipse, which gives us all of these newfangled capabilities and whatnot, but 512 MB of RAM? The laptop I'm using during my presentations only has 256 MB. I sure hope that all companies that are planning on using Notes in 2007 have also planned on having 512 MB of RAM in all of their PC and laptops.

After the keynote, I went back to my hotel room and rehearsed my XML presentation one last time. I relaxed for a while, then my wife and I went down for lunch. It was a great lunch. My wife was very impressed.

I got to the room where I was giving my presentation about twenty minutes early, and got set up fairly easily. Speaking with a microphone turned out to be no big deal at all, and I didn't even notice it while I was speaking. Afterwards, I got some nice compliments from Brad Balassaitis, Scott Good and Mac Guidera, who are also speaking at this conference. The comments turned in by the other attendees did mention a few things I need to improve upon as a professional speaker, though. Since I had so much material for the XML presentation, I stated up-front that I only wanted to answer questions at the end. However, I found out that some people do prefer to ask questions during the presentation, and actually prefer how spontaneous questions break up the flow of the presentation.

For my second presentation @ 4:45 PM, I decided to ask if anyone had any questions after I completed each example. This did seem to work much better, in my opinion. There were only about 20 people in attendance, which was what I had anticipated. Overall, I thought I did very well for my first time out. One complaint I got on both presentations was the lack of time to take notes while I was changing slides. When I was at the Advisor Conference held last July, all of the slides were printed and given to each attendee in a binder. When I was developing my presentations, I had this in mind. However, this time around, none of the slides were printed. Had I known, I would have printed 100 copies of the slides for each presentation myself and shipped them over. Next time, I'll focus on having less slides, and leave them on the screen longer so folks can write notes about them.

After I was finished with my second presentation, my wife and I went back to our hotel room so I could drop-off my laptop. My wife was feeling a bit tired after all of the walking we did last night and she did this morning on her own, so we decided to not go into town tonight and instead see a movie at the Suncoast casino next door. So, I slipped out of my red Advisor polo into something less striking and we went down to the welcome reception.

Dinner was just as good as lunch, if not better. There was cheese tortellini's, fettuccini Alfredo, roast beef, and, of course, two free drinks. I'd have to say that there must be at least 600 people here this time around, at least double what there was in last July's conference.

My wife and I drove over to the Suncoast, which was probably a 1/4 mile down the road. Since my wife is a big ballroom dancing fan, we saw Take the Lead, which was actually quite good. The movie is based on the story of Pierre Dulane, who introduced ballroom dancing to the New York Public School System. The results of Pierre's inspiration is featured in the documentary Mad Hot Ballroom. I'd have to say that the sound system was the loudest I'd ever experienced before. After the movie, my wife and I went back to our hotel and crashed. Another fun and fulfilling day for us!

(8)

While the flight into Vegas was uneventful, my wife and I were pretty uncomfortable. I suspect that the seating on the plane had been reconfigured to get as many people on the plane as possible. Instead of having one row with two seats and an adjacent row with three seats, there were two rows with three seats each. The seats themselves seemed small, and there was hardly any legroom. My wife and I also got to experience the "new and improved" NWA, where they charge you for everything except one drink. They were selling snack boxes for $3 and a bag of trail mix for $1. I half expected someone to start passing around a hat to help save the airline, or for the flight attendants to walk around with those wicker baskets on a stick like they do at church.

We waited at least a half an hour for our luggage to come down the chute. Since the same thing happened to me last time I was here, I think the delay is done on purpose, so that you'll end up watching all of the commercials for the shows. Once we got our luggage, my wife and I went off to the National car rental, where we had to wait another twenty minutes for the people ahead of us to give up trying to rent a car without a credit card. I felt sorry for the service rep, who handled those incredibly annoying people well.

While driving in, my wife and I got to experience the traffic that builds on 95 on a moments notice. They did finish a new overpass that was underway when I was here last July, but I think they have much more road work to do to ease the congestion.

After finally arriving at the hotel @ 4:00 PM, I stopped down by the conference area and picked up my Advisor speaker material. I now have two nifty red polo shirts to add to my collection. They also gave the speakers a nice collection of snacks, which my wife and I ate almost all of them as it was now 7:00 PM our time, back in Michigan. Of particular interest where the spicy gummi peppers. Can't say that I'd ever had a spicy gummi snack before!

When I checked the speaker schedule, I notice that my speaking schedule had been changed. Instead of speaking on three times, I'm now only speaking on Monday (tomorrow). My original schedule called for me to speak on:

• Monday, 1:30 PM - 2:45 PM Introduction to XML & Domino
• Tuesday, 4:45 PM - 6:00 PM Add Agents to Domino Applications
• Wednesday, 11:15 AM - 12:30 PM Add Agents to Domino Applications

I'm now doing both presentations only once on Monday:

• Monday, 1:30 PM - 2:45 PM Introduction to XML & Domino
• Monday, 4:45 PM - 6:00 PM Add Agents to Domino Applications

The great thing about this is that after Monday, I'm free to do what I like without having to worry about speaking later in the day. So, I can see more presentations that I probably would have before. However, it is a strange feeling having been bumped in the schedule.

My wife and I finally drove into town for dinner at 5:00 PM (8:00 PM EST). We went to the Wynn, which I think is the best looking of the big-box casinos. We ate at the Red 8. The pot-stickers were excellent, definitely as good as mentioned on Rachel Ray's Tasty Travels show. My wife got a Mai Tai that was incredibly strong. I think it was 95% rum and 5% water. The Pacific Breeze I ordered was good. For entrees, my wife ordered the Pad Thai with chicken, which she really liked. The order was big enough for three people at least, and she probably would have taken the rest home if not for us being three time zones away from home. I got the Cantonese the BBQ spare ribs, which were good, but not great.

My wife and I took a walk over to The Mirage to catch the flaming volcano bit. I actually liked it more than last time. We then walked over to The Venetian to stroll the indoor mall. I had completely forgotten about the overwhelming odor of the place, which I now know to be a special perfume pumped through the ventilation system. When we made it to the food court I noticed that the Krispy Kreme was actually here, not in Ceaser's Palace, as I'd originally thought. Unfortunately, the donut line was completely dismantled, so no hot donuts for us.

At around 9:00 PM, my wife and I were getting pretty tired, so we walked back to the Wynn to pick up our car from the valet. We stopped by the Wall of Dreams exhibit, and I'd have to say that my wife and I were pretty underwhelmed. Here they go and spend all of this money, only to have an animatronic frog sing "What a wonderful world". Hmm. Must be Steve Wynn's favorite song or something. All in all, my wife had a great time during our first night together in Vegas!

(10)

My wife are all packed and ready to head out to Vegas this morning. We're flying out of DTW at 12:12 PM and arriving at LAS at 1:38 PM. Based on the weather report, it should be perfect for taking in the sights during the day and at night:



None of that 125° insanity I had last year when I was there in July. Hope to see you there!

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I'll be speaking at the Advisor Summit, the first of which will be held in Las Vegas April 9 - 13. My topics at this conference will be:

• Adding Agents to Domino Applications
• XML & Domino

I figure I'll start working on them in February. After just finishing a technical edit of twelve chapters of a new Notes/Domino programming book, I feel I deserve a little break.

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Thoughts and pics from the second day of the Advisor Live conference. Click the Read More link below to see...



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I have many pictures from tonight. Click the Read More link below to see...



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Here's my recound of Day one at the Advisor Live conference. Click Read More below for all the details...



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I have many pictures from tonight. Click the Read More link below to see...



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Even more pictures from tonight. Click the Read More link below to see...



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The last batch of pictures from tonight (I promise). Click the Read More link below to see...



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This is the start of my my travelblog. Click Read More below for the inside scoop...



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I received a Travel Planner Email from Northwest Airlines today, and it included the following weather forcast for this week:



I can't remember if I've ever experienced 115° temperatures or not. Hopefully, it will be that "dry heat" I keep hearing about!

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With only three days left before the $200 discount expired, I registered for the Lotus Advisor Live conference this morning. Now all I need to do is get myself a room at the JW Marriott and book my flight. I won't be presenting, but I plan to add bring my own special brand of punk'd-out Notes expertise to the proceedings.

I hope to see you there!

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Since I haven't been to any IBM/Lotus conference since LotuSphere 2002, I decided that it was time for me to step outside of my cozy surroundings and get to a conference this year. As it so happens, there is a Lotus Advisor Live being held in Las Vegas this year, from July 17 - 21. The price for conference (less the pre-conference and post-conference stuff, which doesn't sound too compelling) is only $1,395. Compared to what it costs to go to LotuSphere these days, this sounds like a fair price to me. I haven't gone to an Advisor conference since 1998, so I imagine that the topics have changed a bit since then. I actually have the agenda for the sessions presented back then. I want to post the agenda here when I have a chance, as the topics back then sound so outdated now its funny.

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