Free your hands from the mouse

Not trying to do any series of "using computer without mouse", but here's another very usefull tool which frees your hands even more from mouse: Launchy - The Open Source Keystroke Launcher. This little tool adds a hot key e.g. alt + space. By that you can start any application which is under Start menu or in desktop.

I have used this awesome piece of software for 4-5 years now and I just love it. It's fast to use, just alt + space and start typing. In addtion you can even open html pages with this tool, e.g. I'm using it to open an online dictionary, wikipedia... and not forgetting the xpages forum :)

More keyboard shortcuts

I just want to use computer as much as possible without the mouse. So I must love the keyboard short cuts. Yes. Using keyboard short cuts saves some time, not much but they are really handy. Down side is to learn them and to remember all the key combinations, especially if you don't use them every day.

I think the best way to learn a new combination is to punish your self. OK, don't get any dirty here :) If you really want to learn a new key combination, just start using it. Literally. Even if you just did your action using the mouse, undo it and redo the action with the "new" key combination. Even better is if you do this like 2-3 times.

I remember they day, when I learned the Eclipse's ctrl + shift + r and ctrl + shift + t key combinations. By that you can open any of your classes / file resources without even touching the mouse. Nice. Now when Domino Designer is based on the Eclipse so the main key combination are available in DDE as well. Just try the ctrl + shift + r and I guarantee you love it.

Change XPages build to automatic build

By default Domino Designer (DDE) does the XPages build during every save. This is great, but only when the number of the builded elements are low. As the project grows, the time to do the build takes more and more time. As far as I know, when using the manual build, you don't know exactly how long the build takes time, right? You just save and wait some time so that the server is ready? Correct me if I'm wrong here.

Second "problem" (at least a personal one) is that I'm using a lot (read LOT) of ctrl + s combination. This causes a great number of unneeded compiles and causes just extra work on server side. We have also found out that this also causes some problems on other developers, but I'll get back on this issue in future blog(s).

When changed to manual compilation mode, you can actually see some build indicator on screen. Some times the build takes only a few seconds, some times it takes longer. While server is doing the compilation phase, the application is not available and without any feedback you might think "what went wrong" if the application doesn't respond after hitting the broser's F5 button :)

When I changed the automatic build to manual mode I also started to use the ctrl + b key combination which is nice and quick way to do the compile without any mouse movement or so. However ctrl + b does something else, right? Yes bolds text and this is yet another problem. If you have an XPage open and you do ctrl + b, you get extra unwanted "style='font-weight:bold'" unformed XML tags to your source code and these also prevents from code to compile properly. Which is worce is that you don't even see these "tags" if you're using the design mode, they appear only in the XML source code.


Luckilly since the DDE is based on Eclipse, you can change every quick key combination. You can find them in Preferences ==> General ==> Keys. Easy !! I choose the ctrl + shift + b for build (which should be the default from my opinion).

One way to pull up personal learning curve

Last 3-4 years I've made a "plan" (my new years promise) of techniques or frameworks that I should study during the next year. The listed techniques are more or less items that I personally just find cool or they are really useful in my knowhow.

I remember when I first started this, my list was huge. I think it had more than 10 items in it or so. I thought that "I can handle all of this in one whole year". Well, till the end of the year I think I checked only couple of them. The list was just way too long. First lesson learned was that I was focusing on way too many things and my time was sliced on way too many things so I actually just scratched the surface on everything and really learned nothing (so to say). As my defence, at that time I had just jumped into J2EE world and everything was totally new for me (and I love coding Java) but still. The obvious second lesson learned was to keep the list short (and simple). From that I had only 3-4 items on my list and I have found that that is good practise. Some times even that is too long. Besides 4 items is really easy to devide to a year :)

The reason why I'm doing this "study list" is simple. I found out that a list like this really helps me to focus on learning the "right things". The things that I really need to learn. The list is there also to remind what to do if I find out some extra time and don't have anything to do. Lately I haven't found time slots like these, but you never know ...

Last year one the main techniques was to learn XPages. The others were related more or less to J2EE world (Spring Framework 3.x version, JPA etc) and they were more or less left out from my learning scope. With XPages I succeeded quite well. I think my previous Domino and Java / J2EE experience helped a lot to adopt the XPages world. The 3rd place in the OpenNTF Custom Control development contest (1st contest) gave me a huge boost to dive even further in to the world of XPages. Coding  XPages is fun.

For upcoming year I have listed following techniques that I'll study (in no order):

- XPages mobile applications (Extension library components, Dojo mobile)
- Learn more JavaScript and Dojo
- HTML5

Big things in the list again, but I think and I hope that I find both motivation and time to learn all of these, especially the HTML5 seems really interesting.

My public blog

OK. As a part of my new years promise, I finally decided to open a public blog. This is something that have been in my mind quite some time now. And after I joined Twitter, I realized that I missed an public blog.

However the fact of "dead blogs" have kept me of not doing this before. I hate dead blogs. I wasn't sure how long I'm ambitious to maintain this. I'm not sure even at the moment, but now I'm ready and willing to give a try. Last couple of weeks turned the sledge to this directions; ideas of what to blog and how to blog kept on popping so ... here we are.

Blogging is not totally new for me. I alreay have one blog that I maintain, but it's in our company's intranet (non public). However every now and then (every 9-10 week or so) I write something to our company's public blog (http://www.sofor.fi/sofor/soforwww.nsf/sp3?open&cid=Blogit&pystynavinf=sofor.fi\Navi\Yritys\Blogit&pystynavinfa=o) but the text in there is only in finnish (sorry). Maybe you can use the Google translator to find out what's going on  :)


Anyway... the idea of this blog is to share my experiences and ideas in my projects related mainly to classic Domino, XPages and J2EE application development. Not forgetting the "tips'n'tricks". This is the idea, we'll see how it turns out.