I have been asked by a client to assist in making the web frontends of number of Lotus / IBM Notes databases, used for critical LOB functions, compatible with modern browsers.
As it stands, the web frontends of these databases only work in IE7, and even then they're temperamental at best. The JS uses IE-specific extensions, everything is in tables, and they render poorly on pretty much every browser available today. With IE7 no longer in support, they want to modernise these interfaces.
I have very little experience with Notes, but as an exploratory exercise I've managed to open up the databases in Domino Designer, add a few Stylesheet / Script resources, include them in the $$HTMLHead variable and reworked one Form to use a frontend framework, which looks good.
Obviously working on live applications is out of the question, so my thinking is to take a copy of the NSF files, and make the changes on the copies. My question is: how can I then deploy only the form / subform / resource changes to the 'live' NSF files?
Deployment:
In your new modified database :
You define in the Database properties that is a Database file is a master template (give a name)
In the production database :
first do a backup ! copy (only design) to a new copy of the prod
You define in the Database properties that it inherits from master template (same name)
on the prod make refresh design
more details : https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSVRGU_9.0.1/com.ibm.designer.domino.main.doc/H_ABOUT_REFRESHING_A_DESIGN.html
Sorry to state the obvious, but since you have a Notes client and a Domino server, you have a quite extensive documentation at your disposal in the form of databases located in the /help/ directory. Make sure they are full-text-indexed.
And since we are on the subject of templates, Domino comes with a host of ready-made, ready-to-use apps that you can customize and canibalize. Look for discussion9.ntf for starters.
You may want to start here, then go there, and finally that will give you the keys to build word-class web apps on Domino.
Last thing, if you are on V9, the Designer help is crap. Grap a copy of the 8.5 version. Seriously.
If you want to build a modern web based front-end to existing Domino data, take a look at the following presentations:
http://www.slideshare.net/TexasSwede/ad102-break-out-of-the-box
and
http://www.slideshare.net/TexasSwede/break-out-of-the-box-part-2
As others already said, you should create a template and then just refresh/replace the design of the production database using that template.
You may want to consider working with an experienced Notes/Domino developer for that project, there are quite a few caveats and workarounds you need to know know about...
Related
Is there a standard way to deploy Umbraco without the backoffice? Some other cmses call this Author / Publish.
I want to configure 2 sites, the public site which does not have a backoffice, and an author site which does have the backoffice. Both of those sites will target the same database, but the author site will only be accessible from within an internal vpn.
The benefit of this approach is security. If there is no backend available on the public site and it is essentially a read only copy of the site it is much harder to hack.
You can deploy the website on one of the servers without the /Umbraco or /Umbraco-client folders which will effectively remove the backoffice. What you're really looking at is a load-balanced scenario. Umbraco 7.3 makes this really easy and there's a fair bit of documentation available.
I would recommend taking a look at the Load Balancing documentation on https://our.umbraco.org/Documentation/Getting-Started/Setup/Server-Setup/Load-Balancing/ - it includes a "recipe" for previous versions along with a good guide on the pitfalls.
I'm looking at some (PHP) Frameworks, and I just noticed this in the Laravel documentation:
Like most web-development frameworks, Laravel is designed to protect your application code, bundles, and local storage by placing only files that are necessarily public in the web server's DocumentRoot. This prevents some types of server misconfiguration from making your code (including database passwords and other configuration data) accessible through the web server. It's best to be safe.
I'm familiar with CodeIgniter and CakePHP, as far as I know, these two frameworks don't do this. Should you really split it up and place your core logic outside of the webroot? In my experience, most clients use shared hosting and are not able to change their VirtualHost settings.
What kind of misconfiguration could you possibly do that would output your passwords? When developing, should you really do this?
Yes, keeping only those files which should be publicly accessible in DocumentRoot is a best practice for web application security. Consider:
Every file which is private would need a rule configured with the web server to explicitly block it.
Anyone adding files to the project needs to consider web server security settings. Simply keeping the files in separate directories makes it obvious what's public. And developers don't need to change security configurations.
Separating executable code and static files is a good practice anyway.
Not blocking access to PHP scripts can cause unintended consequences. For example, you may have a script to update some DB records when run manually at the command line, so someone simply guessing a script name can run it over the internet.
Monitoring for and cleaning malicious code written to the public directory is much easier if the real application logic is elsewhere. See Wordpress breakins for an example.
CakePHP supports this - see deployment:
CakePHP applications should have the document root set to the
application’s app/webroot. This makes the application and
configuration files inaccessible through a URL.
There are some queries for which we need resolution before we purchase sitefinity 5.0 license. I would really appreciate if could get answers to these
What are the recommended guidelines to setup the sitefinity project in the source control? If there 4 to 5 developers working on the project, what should be the starting point in setting up the initial codebase? Do every developer has to create the sitefinity website and DB on their dev-boxes?
Is it recommend to setup a common DB for the sitefinity website where all the dev-machine would be connecting to do the development, if not what is the alternative approach?
Is there any online documentation available related to build and release of sitefinity web applications, other than publishing from within the visual studio?
Thanks
Gaurav
We've been developing with Sitefinity since version 2, with multiple developers.
To answer your questions specifically:
Have a single developer (ideally your lead dev) create a clean sitefinity visual studio solution on their local machine. Check it into your source control repository and have each additional developer pull down a copy from there. You're now all in sync.
In terms of database location, two approaches work - either have each person run a local database, and in the web.config setup the connection string location as . (i.e. local). That way no one needs to check out the web.config to run it. Otherwise use a common development/testing server for the database. We've found the easiest way is to each have a local DB, unless multiple devs are working on very specific tasks together at the same time.
I have not seen any online documentation related to building outside of visual studio. If you have TFS or a MS build server, it should work fine as well.
In general, there is nothing 'special' about Sitefinity's architecture that separates it from any other .NET / MSSQL solution. Best practice that falls under these technologies still applies.
My experience with source control has been one of two options. If you are using SQLExpress user instance databases (that is an mdf in the App_Data folder) I've found versioning everything except this database file and the dataconfig.config file in the configurations folder will allow every developer to run their own copy of the website.
from there you can either do some kind of manual merge of the database or just create a new one for deployment.
This option works best if your developers are simply working on features, and don't need to be working on an actual website, modifying content that has to keep in sync.
Alternatively, if they do need to work with live content and it all has to be the same, create the database in a shared server they all have access to, and version everything (since the connection string should be the same for both).
This works best if your developers are doing work to support existing content as opposed to say creating modules that manipulate the database (creating tables, columns, etc), because keep in mind with this method, everyone will be accessing and modifying the same database.
Personally, my preference is option 1, because it allows each developer full control over their environment. the source could then be merged and shadowed to a staging server, so that the main site content is only affected by this one instance.
I hope this is helpful!
I want to build a website that displays data from an external databases. The data must be displayed in the form of charts, because charts are more expressive. I've never developed any websites yet, can anyone give me some advice about existing web frameworks and what are the advantages and disadvantages of them?
Which framework should I choose? The data are stored in an SQL Server. Because new data report types might be required in the future, the framework must be easy to modify and expand.
This is purely subjective and there are many answers to this. With that said I'll tell you what I'd use:
You mentioned that your database is using SQL Server. I'll assume that you'll want to host your website on a windows server for sake of argument. Given that, I'd choose either ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC given that they are natural picks for a windows server hosting websites on IIS. Then I'd find myself a nice jQuery charting plugin see this SO question.
I am working on a Web Project similar to Google-Video.
As for now, I want to start coding the site.
I know some PHP, HTML and MySQL.
I already have:
Database built and ready (in MySQL)
Links and Tags in the Database
The thing is, I don't want to code everything from hand.
As I've seen so far, with CMS it's not possible to use my own database. Or am I wrong?
And what Framework would you suggest me?
Looking forward for your advice!
Thanks
You should probably start over, but use your existing DB design as your logical schema to be implemented in the CMS you eventually choose.
Go to http://cmsmatrix.org/ and compare Drupal, Joomla!, eZ Publish and TYPO3 for the best fit for your requirements.
Also, pay attention to the search engine features available with each one. e.g. eZ Publish eZ Find is based on Lucene.
In terms of functionality ( but excluding add management and your specific layout or graphic-design) you should be able to create a reasonable clone within a few hours using eZ. Here is one example http://untoldstories.eu/ezinfo/about