Getting started with XPages on IBM Bluemix - part I

 Well, finally it is Friday. It's been a busy week with a nice flow of Domino related development work. And tonight I wanted to take the chance to get my fingers on XPages on IBM Bluemix. So this blog post is about the steps it took me to get started...


As I do not want this experimental stuff to interfere with my work related projects I first started to update my private laptop to the latest and greatest releases (Designer 9.0.1 FP4 and XPages Extension Library 901v00_13). After that I spent some time  messing around with my bluemix account and finally creating a new one (it seems my old one has become inactive since I haven't used for too long?). Finally I was able to log in to IBM Bluemix and found the .xsp runtime in the catalog.

Create your Bluemix app

1. Login to IBM Bluemix at http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/bluemix/
2. Open the Bluemix Catalog
   
3. Scroll to the very end of the catalog to the "Bluemix Lab Catalog" (currently XPages on Bluemix are in experimental stage)
   
4. I first created the sample todo app from the available boilerplate by selecting the option "XPages Web Starter" in the Boilerplate section. This is the same app as shown at IBM ConnectED 2015 in Orlando.
   
5. Specify a name for the app and click create
   
6. Wait until the app has been deployed automatically. This will take a couple of minutes (so I guess this is a good time to get a cold beer from the fridge)...
   
7. Finally, the app should be up and running:
   
   And tatataaaa: it can be accessed at http://rum.mybluemix.net/ 

Connect Domino Designer to your IBM Bluemix app

So the next step is to get access to the app from Domino Designer.

1. In the Dashboard menue click on "Start Coding"
   
2. Click on the button "Download Starter Code". This will download a zip file containing the NSF with the application's design as well as an IBM Bluemix manifest file.
    
   
   BTW: The content of the manifest file can be displayed in Bluemix by clicking on the Environment Variables menue entry.
3. Additionally you will need to download the ID file to use this NSF and to connect to theBluemix server. The ID File can be accessed from XPages NoSQL Data Service page. To open this page, open the dashboard and click on Services to access the Data Service page.
   
   and from there click on the "Launch" button on the top right corner.
   
   
4. Download the ID file from the following page - and display the password (f you don't want to guess it... ;-))
   

Now you are ready for opening the database in Domino Designer - but this will be covered in my next blog post.