For those of you who are wondering about what the heck managed beans are and how they related to all things XPages I highly recommend reading Tim Tripcony's blog entry entitled "What the Heck is a Bean" which he orginally posted on May 5, 2011.

Also, the Mastering XPages book does a good job of explaining managed beans. I am very thankful for both Tim's article and the Mastering XPages book as both of these resources helped me out today preparing some material for my "Social Business Toolkit" session which I am giving next week at PACLUG.

Read "What the Heck is a Bean" on Tim's blog > 

In the Fall of 2010 students in the ICT Technology cirriculum at ROC Mandriaan have developed a real-world relationship management system XPages application for the Round Texel Regatta with mentoring from "Lotus Loves People".

Here is a video of the students talking about the app (English subtitles are supplied):

Here is a copy of the slide deck showing the app that they build:

And also a blog entry by Rob Bontekoe. Truly some great stuff surrounding college students using IBM XPages technology to develop real-world apps.

Steve Castledine demonstrates how to use the XPages Layout Framework Template which is available on OpenNTF.org. You may need to turn up the volume as it's a bit low. 

Hot off the press:

XPages brings Domino Web application development to an entirely a new level. It allows you to modernize your existing Domino applications and provide an incredible user experience and interface. XPages allows you to take advantage of the unique capabilities of the Domino platform and build powerful and dynamic applications that can easily beat out competitive solutions.

As part of the Midwest Lotus User Group Conference 2011, MWLUG is sponsoring the MWLUG XPrize Design Competition to let you show the world what you can do with XPages. We encourage you to show your development and design skills by using XPages to updating one of the a selected number of existing Domino applications. You will be judged not only on your XPages development skills but also on user experience and interface design. The winners will be announced during the closing ceremony of MWLUG on Friday, August 26th, 2011.

Learn how you can enter >

IBM's Paul Hannan and Maire Kehoe presented this excellent session at Lotusphere 2011 on the XPages Extension Library:

Premier IBM Business Partner Intec has a fantastic updated whitepaper entitled "Maximising the Benefits of XPages in 8.5.2:

Almost a year ago I wrote a whitepaper called "Maximising the Benefits of Lotus Domino 8.5.x with XPages". This was an open discussion of the pros and cons of XPages, based on Domino 8.5.1. I have updated the whitepaper to take into account the significant enhancements in XPages in 8.5.2 and a year's more experience of developing applications in XPages.

XPages is still, in my mind, a game-changer for Domino, providing in a RAD environment capabilities that have not been available before without significant effort, if at all. Yes, RAD has a reputation of quick and dirty or prototype, and XPages can be that if you want it. But It also provides the framework for building a sophisticated application and makes UI design more important than ever before.

Maximising the Benefits of XPages in 8.5.2 on the Intec blog >

If you have not yet looked into the power of using themes in your XPages applications, may I suggest that you download and review a presentation given by Tim Tripcony of GBS at the BLUG and UKLUG conferences entitled "Taking Themes to the Next Level - Getting more out of XPages the easy way".

The slide deck covers:

• What is a Theme?
• How are Themes typically used?
• How do Themes actually work?
• Going beyond the typical to...
  • Keep your XPage markup clean
  • Enhance application performance
  • Maintain device-targeted user interfaces
  • Streamline team development

Read Tim's blog entry and download the slide deck >

Mark Barton has a must read blog entry on generating barcodes with XPages:

Due to the ability for an XPage to easily leverage Java code it is quite straightforward to integrate an existing Java library, so when the XPage is called a rendered barcode is returned.

For this demo I have decided to use a commercial library – the code will operate in a demo mode and is reasonably priced if you decide to buy it.  For this demo I am only interested in the Datamatrix barcode so I downloaded that specific Jar file from here.

Creating Barcodes with an XPage / Reading them with Flex >

[via Mark Myers]