XPages is a great technology to build rapidly web and mobile apps, but another reason why I enjoy working with XPages so much is the community. I think it’s fair to say that the community is outstanding. People are sharing information and helping each other in an incredible way. Below are some examples and pointers.
XPages.info contains among other things a list of daily XPages related news, for example blog entries, StackOverflow answers, open source from OpenNTF, etc. In the last 9.5 months more than 900 news entries have been listed there. In addition to XPages.info, Collaboration Today now lists the same XPages related news entries and the community shares news on Twitter.
There is also a big amount of freely available education videos about XPages produced by the community. David Leedy hosts NotesIn9, a series with 81 episodes, 20 hours of videos and 142k views. David hosts the show and does many videos himself, but he also had 16 other contributors from the community. GBS and TLCC are hosting another series, called the X-Series which has 18 hours of videos and 15k views. Additionally OpenNTF has a YouTube channel with 12 hours of videos and 106k views. So as a new XPages developer you can actually watch videos for one full week.
At the beginning of this year the community decided to use StackOverflow for questions and answers related to XPages. Since then 750 questions have been created and 84% have been answered by the community. These are questions in addition to the questions in the IBM forum.
OpenNTF.org is the open source site used by XPages developers which is run by OpenNTF.Inc, a group of 31 member companies who are leveraging IBM Collaboration Solutions technologies. New project releases are contributed almost daily (last year 360 releases) as well as simple code snippets. OpenNTF is currently hosting the fourth XPages development contest. In the first three contests more than 100 entries were submitted with high quality controls and applications. There is also an ongoing XSnippets contest. IBM uses OpenNTF to publish new features early like the Extension Library, Mobile Controls and Social Enabler and has received great feedback from the community. Furthermore OpenNTF has delivered sites like XPages.info, XSnippets and Collaboration Today to the community.
There is also a big number of XPages podcasts – The Taking Notes Podcast and This Week in Lotus. Presentations can be found on SlideShare.
Another topic that deserves special attention is the third XPages book because it has been written by experts from the community and is a very valuable resource for developers.
There are many other community related resources and activities, too many to be called out here. Just some more examples I want to mention are the active Japanese community with their own Facebook page and the education courses from TLCC and XPages101. Obviously XPages is also very present at Lotusphere/Connect and many local user groups events. Recently several XPages developers in Netherlands had their first XPages Beer event.
I apologize for everything that I haven’t mentioned here. As I said these are just examples and not a complete list. The reason why I haven’t called out people is because there are simply too many which is a nice problem to have.