London Developer Co-op: news

Registration for ICON UK is Open

Julian and Matt have been organisers at UKLUG for the last few years. Well now the name has changes to ICON UK and this year it will be based in Brighton and we'll be there in force. Will we see you there as well?

Oh and we helped develop the new website all using XPages and Twitter Bootstrap. if you need something similar for your site then we can definitely help out!

Meet me in St Louis

Continuing the year of LUGs, Matt will be heading to IamLUG at the start of May to present a new session about web frameworks. Hopefully he might bump into you there.

BLUG Calling

After the craziness of IBM Connect-o-sphere where all the LDC members were busy little bees, Mark and Matt will be heading to BLUG. Both of them are presenting a session discussing web frameworks and Matt is also reprising XPages Blast for one last time.

They may also have a few of the Conference Survival Tins which were so popular at IBM Connect.

The agenda for BLUG looks amazingly good, so we’d highly recommend that you come along, there will be a lot of the community there and some great technical content.

Our IBM Connect sessions

Both Mark and Matt will be presenting two sessions each at IBM Connect. Mark's sessions cover Java development and getting at your data in different ways, while Matt is covering XPages development and deployment.

The LDC is also sponsoring a couple of events. UK Night has become one of the hot ticket events at Lotusphere over the past few years and we're proud to be sponsoring. Find one of us for a ticket. And we're also sponsoring the Great Geek Challenge which is a great event to show off your knowledge of all things geek. Hopefully we'll see you at one of the events!

New Mobile Project Released

Matt has been working for a couple of months on a new set of XPages mobile custom controls for use, primarily, with the Teamstudio Unplugged product. You can read more about the project here.

IBM Connect: we'll be there in force

Mark, Ben, Julian and Matt will all be in attendance at IBM Connect 2013 (formerly known as Lotusphere). Mark and Matt will both be presenting two sessions each, we'll be sponsoring UKNight, and of course there will be the famous LDC giveaways, though this year we've decided to go for something a little different. Find one of us to know more!

UKLUG: Cardiff, 3 - 4 September 2012

We will be out in force at the UKLUG conference in Cardiff: be sure to come and see us!

Podcast time!

In July 2012, Mark and Matt were invited onto the Taking Notes Podcast to talk about starting XPages from a Java developer's point of view.

New Mobile CRM Application Released

We've recently been working on a mobile web implementation of a CRM System called VMobile. It was released at the start of June 2012, the press release is here.

Plenty of new XPages101 content

Matt has been a busy bee with the XPages101 site so if you haven’t visited for a while, be sure to do so. Lots of good content (75 videos) including tips on XPages development with Git, Jasmine and more!

Lotusphere 2012

Following a successful Lotusphere in Orlando this year, be sure to check out the goodies page for updated wallpaper, presentations, and the like.

LDC: The year in review

A week before IBM Lotusphere / Connect we realised this was by far our biggest conference yet, with 2 speakers, 3 sessions, 2 sponsored parties and bleeding t-shirts everywhere. So, what have we been up to during the last year?

Well, bucking the global slowdown for one thing, new clients now include one of the world’s largest media websites, another multi-national insurance company, and myriad smaller interesting clients, with some monster projects in the pipeline (fingers crossed).

International clients are now the norm rather than the exception, with contact coming in from all over Europe and the US. To cater to these requirements our skills set has diversified even more. Adding to bleeding-edge IBM and Microsoft stuff, we have had large client implementations using Spring and Spring webflow, PHP and advanced HTML5.

Nearly every new project contains a mobile element and all coding now caters to this as a matter of course.

This was especially true of our XPages work which seemed to really reach a tipping point in 2011. Like other projects, everything we’re doing with XPages also has some mobile aspect to it, but the interesting thing is that there is now a constant stream of new applications being created with XPages (NB: that’s “new new”, not “new upgrades”). And 2012 doesn’t show any sign of slowing down.

2012 will be more of the same, providing more for our clients and keeping pace with the ever accelerating rate of change in both IT and business requirements.

It’s time to kick arse (we’re British) and write / delete code (remember: less is more, and more code means more test cases!).

LDC will be at Lotusphere 2012 in force

The LDC will be making a good showing at the premier Lotus Notes and Domino conference. Mark Myers and Matt White will be presenting sessions covering various aspects of development best practices. We are also sponsoring a couple of events in the form of the ever popular "UK Night at Shula's Bar" and the "Great Geek Challenge" where some of our sought after t-shirts will be spot prizes for the evening.

Podcast: A View Into the World of NoSQL, with Mark Myers

Mark got to take part with the Taking Notes podcast No142 chatting about the new generation of NoSQL databases—why not pop over and give it a listen!

Helping out Auntie

Ben is working into the new year for a certain British media organisation in MediaCityUK, which is going well, with interesting work to boot.

First case study published

As promised case studies are y-comen’! The first one is now live, and takes the reader through an offline-capable mobile web application project we worked on.

XPages Training Course in Austria

Matt will be running a new four day training course in Vienna next month (October), covering everything from the basics right up to Dojo, Server Side JavaScript, Java and Managed Beans. You can sign up for the course on-line.

August: New XPages Training Course

Matt White ran a new one-day training course, “XPages201 - Intermediate XPages Development”, after IamLUG in St. Louis at the beginning of this month. If you’d like the same course run in your company, please contact us.

July: case studies coming soon!

LDC members have completed a number of interesting projects recently—look out for some case studies on this site soon.

June: Matt White becomes an IBM Champion

Congratulations to one of our founding consultants, Matt White, for becoming an IBM Champion. Great recognition for all the fantastic work he has done for the IBM community over the years.

May: London Developer Co-op co-sponsor UKLUG

We were delighted to co-sponsor the UK Lotus User Group (UKLUG) conference held in late May at the Manchester Museum Of Science And Industry. Plenty of LDC goodies were given away and appreciated, and the conference was a big success. Well done to organiser Warren Elsmore and the rest of the team!

February: Our very own Mark Myers won Lotusphere Idol at Lotusphere this year

Lotusphere Idol started a few years back, in a bid to find new speaking talent for the venerable conference. Auditionees are invited to give a five minute presentation before a panel, with the winner going on to give a full one hour presentation based on their initial submission. To qualify for LS Idol, auditionees must not have spoken at the conference before. You can read more about the session in Ed Brill’s post about it.

LotusUserGroup.org also covered Mark’s performance in their “2 Minutes With” Interview Podcasts series, talking to Bob Stephan and Eric Nolan of SMT Corporation.

February: “This year’s best Lotusphere T-shirt”

Volker Weber has posted about the London Developer Co-op’s recent fund-raising efforts with Bruce & Gayle Elgort of Elguji Software and Steve McDonagh at Lotusphere’s recent UK Night. We commissioned some fabulous “pixel art” showing the Lotus world in all its finery (it was entitled “It’s a small Lotus world”, in keeping with the Disney venue for Lotusphere). Bruce then had the brilliant idea that this should become part of a charity drive, and so limited edition prints of this work were put up as prizes in a raffle, along with some wonderful original artwork from Mr. McDonagh.

To date, we have raised over $3,500 for the Children’s Cancer Association, so many thanks to all who contributed!