In my last post, I talked about how I implemented a partial Jakarta NoSQL driver using the AppDev Pack as a back end instead of the Notes.jar classes used by the primary implementation. Though the limitations in the ADP mean that it lacks a number of useful features compared to the primary one, it was still an interesting experiment and has the nice side effect of working with essentially any Java app server and Java version 8 or above. Beyond the Proton API calls, the driver brought up the interesting topic of handling authentication. Proton has three ways of working in this regard: Anonymous, which is what you might expect based on how that works elsewhere in Domino. This is easy but not particularly useful except in specific circumstances. Client certificate authentication, where you create a TLS keychain for a given user and associate it with a Directory user (e.g. CN=My Proton App/O=MyOrg), and then your app performs all operations as that user. This is basically like if you ran a remote app with NRPC using a client Notes ID. Act-as-User, which builds on the above authentication by configuring an OAuth broker service that can hand out OIDC tokens on behalf of named users. This is sort of like server-to-server communication with the "Trusted Servers" config field in the server doc, but different in key ways.

If you are using DOTS in Domino 12.x, you might have seen some NullPointer Exceptions after you have updated a DOTS plugin. Recommendation was to delete the complete workspace-dots folder prior to starting DOTS after the upgrade. This issue has been addressed in SPR# SJAAC3BNWV: DOTS – Workspace need to be deleted on every change and add of new plugin. With this fix it is no longer necessary to delete the workspace-dots folder. Not sure, when the fix was provided. There is no information about it in the fix list database. But this is only true for Domino on WINDOWS. If you are using DOTS with Domino on LINUX, you will see an error on the Domino server console ( “An error occurred while processing the command”) or even worse, the NullPointer Exceptions. The problem is that the underlying API in Domino does not delete files starting with a dot. (hidden files on UNIX systems).

Though the bulk of the work I've been doing for the XPages Jakarta EE project is to bring JEE technologies to Domino, the NoSQL driver has been designed to lead a double life: it works in an XPages context, but it's written to not have any XPages dependencies. One reason for this is that I want it to be usable if you use, for example, the Open Liberty runtime project to side-car apps on a Domino server but still use Notes.jar for data access. Another reason for its organization, though, is that I intended for the driver to be portable across implementations. The driver itself is split into a main bundle and a ".lsxbe" implementation bundle. My original thought was to make that ready for a JNX or Domino JNA implementation, but it's pretty flexible.

A few days ago, a customer reported that one of our applications was not working properly and sent the associated logs. It was very quickly clear under what conditions the error occurred. So it was reproducible, which is the first important step to troubleshooting. Nevertheless, it took some time to locate the cause. Finally, I was able to find the “error”. To send it ahead. The “error” is not limited to a specific Domino version. The problem also occurs under Domino 9.0.1 FP10.

This post is long overdue. I originally planned to write it to document the issues and solutions while working on the app, but as the problems kept appearing I wanted to make sure that I have all the answers. Now I know that I probably won't have them in the near future as I'm seeing new issues even after having the app in production for some time.