Chapter 3. Building Your First XPages Application

Now that the setup details are squared away, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and start some real-world XPages application development. Development technologies are best absorbed by working through practical examples and solving everyday concrete problems. For this, you need a reference application to work with, and the standard Notes Discussion template is an ideal candidate. Pretty much all the topics covered in this book are already implemented in one way or another in the Discussion template, and you will disassemble and rebuild this application as a way of developing your XPages expertise! This is also convenient for you insofar as the Discussion template ships out-of-the-box with Domino Designer, so you automatically obtained this application template as part of the installation work performed in Chapter 2, “Getting Everything You Need.”

A different instance of the reference application is provided for each chapter. Be sure to download these resources so that you can work through the exercises in Domino Designer according as you read your way through this book. This will undoubtedly be the most effective approach from a learning point of view. Typically, the name of a given reference application instance is derived from the chapter with which it is associated. For example, for this chapter, open Chapter3.nsf in Designer. The .nsf resources can be downloaded from this website: