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How a scandalmonger could I be. Remember when I said that there were no web improvement in Domino 8 ? Actually, there is one^* : the ability to output natively a view in JSON instead of XML (DXL) with the OutputFormat=JSON URL parameter (edit: Oh, and DB2 Query views too, sorry to have forgotten to mention it).

* : At least, one interesting, among 4 or 5 new "hacks" (I honestly can't say "feature").

Few days ago I was talking about funny things with Domino's webdav feature. And was really excited about it. I've used it for a while now, was really confident in it and was about to deliver it to the users. Until a strange error has been reported this morning : a file cannot be copied on the webdav share I've set up. A file whose name doesn't contain any '%' symbol (yes, remember, Domino's HTTP task cannot handle '%' in URL). I tried myself, and indeed, the file cannot be copied and explorer displays a pretty obscure error message. Then I opened the domlog in order to find some explanations, and guess what I've found :

HTTP Web Server: The name contains invalid characters or is too long

How funny. Further analyses have shown that the filename's length of the shared resources is limited to 133 bytes, which suits to most of the tree structures. Most of, but not all. I do not see any workaround to this issue, and it's highly probable that there is not.

Honestly, it pisses me off. I know I am blamable and it was in some way hacking the Domino system in order to leverage its features and is by no way supported by IBM, but hey, why couldn't it work ? Why, ô why things just never work as they should with Domino ?

Yes, I am whining again. But as stated Ed Brill, I am an armchair quarterback after all, aren't I ?

Remember my blog post about setting up Domino webdav features 2 months ago (you can refer to Jake's one if you don't speak french) ? Well, I've been playing with it for a while now and I have some cool things to show you. But before going further, one small piece of advice : if you are experiencing authentication problems with Domino's webdav (just as those I was talking about previously), it seems highly probable that your database is at the root (data/) of your server, so move it into a subdirectory. Don't ask me why. I've seen that here and it have magically solved all my problems (be blessed, Jesper).

Back to our topic. The main drawback of Domino's webdav is that you can only interact with shared ressources. No document, no attachment. Quite useful for a Domino developer, but in that state, totaly unusable for the end users. Which is pity because one can easily imagine how we could leverage the document management with Domino if users would have access to the webdav features. By the way, it is interesting to note that IBM is planning to deliver such features with Quickplace 8.0 (you would have known it if you had read my Collaboration University - day 2 report that I haven't published yet (but almost finished for 1 month and a half -- shame on me)). Anyway. The cool thing I wanted to talk about is that actually you can approach such a result with simple tweaks. Let me explain.

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Here is my first blog post in (my pretty poor) english, rather than french. I decided to write this one in english because I really wanted to share my current works and get feedbacks about it. I'm also wondering if writing in english may widen this blog's scope. Anyway, the topic on which I've focused most of my energy during the last couple of weeks is the following : building not-to-slow and maintainable multilingual web applications with Domino.

I've seen some different implementations but no one really convinced me. This topic is not very popular either because - I guess - most of english-speaking people just do not need to care about it (how lucky they are). Before going further, one must distinguish two kinds of translations :

• Translation of the user interface (UI).
• Translation of the data.

I'll focus here on the UI, as I find that the way Domino behave makes building multilingual data feature not too difficult.

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