This post is dedicated to all the people that were involved in the development of the latest enhancements within the Extension Library a.k.a RDBMS support via JDBC. Though JDBC isn't state of the art nowadays, it offers the XPages developer at least a neat and simple way to access relational data. By writing this I simply like to say: thank you!
To be honest: in the last few months I came across with RDBMS only. I accessed it, wrote it and deleted it - without using JDBC at all. Today you'd probably want to use a hibernation framework to do so.
After seeing the latest OpenNTF blog post and watching the great video sample on how to access relational data from an XPage without a hassle, I thought I'll give it a try. The most impressive thing about that really was the way to create an OSGI plugin for the JDBC driver for the server with just a few clicks in DDE. But have a look for yourself here - AND NOW!!!
http://www.openntf.org/main.nsf/blog.xsp?permaLink=NHEF-9N7CKD
To get started I used my Bootstrap 3 Template (https://github.com/zeromancer1972/Bootstrap-3-Template) and tweaked some parts. 5 minutes later I worked on the main part:
"I need a relational database!"
As one of my local Domino servers resides on a Ubuntu server I just picked it up and installed PostgreSQL as this is a sleek database service but powerful - and easy and fast to setup.
I downloaded pgAdmin (http://www.pgadmin.org/) as I didn't want to use the console but a comfortable UI to administer the database and setting up a schema and a table (in that case with 3 columns).
Another 10 minutes later (due to learning how to deal with pgAdmin) I started to create the data table to access my postgres table just to display some data (I created 2 or 3 rows before in die pgAdmin client manually).
I used the @Jdbc SSJS functions that are described in the video from the OpenNTF post. And voila: hello, data!
That was easy as pie. I invested 2 or 3 hours to tweak my UI and the functionality a bit and I finally got the result that YOU can also use for "putzing" (https://twitter.com/Gidgerby ) around with that stuff - it is much fun!
As I always try to do: you can find my little demo out there live: http://mardou.dyndns.org/postgres.nsf/index.xsp
And of course it is open source, you can use it to get started by cloning the repo from here: https://github.com/zeromancer1972/XPages-JDBC