compare sharepoint with java world - sharepoint

I am a good java web developer having knowledge of numbers of technical issues in java industry.
I heard lot about SharePoint. I don't able to understand it because I don't have idea of workings in Microsoft world.
Can someone tell about SharePoint by taking a scenario from java world.

Central repository for what? Not really. No offence but you really need to do a bit more reading first. Try
What is Sharepoint
Microsoft SharePoint - Wikipedia
SharePoint product information page
Can someone tell about SharePoint by taking a scenario from java world.
There isn't a direct correlation to Java. SharePoint is an application, Java is a programming language. It's like asking someone to describe Microsoft Excel in terms of the PHP world - doesn't really make sense as a question.
However, Alfresco is an OSS project is similar to SharePoint and written in Java.
How does it differ from Mircosoft Visual Studio Software
VisualStudio is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), like Eclipse.

Related

Best free or paid video training series for learning Sharepoint 2016 from a Beginner/Intermediate level

I am a web developer who will be starting Sharepoint development and hasn't used Sharepoint much at all from an end user or developer side of things. I am looking for a training class to ramp up on it so I can be a better developer and make more informed architecture decisions. I found this course https://www.pluralsight.com/paths/sharepoint-2016-foundations. Any other ideas?
Im gonna be straight forward with you and tell you that a training class will not take you far for SharePoint Development and are boring as heck.
They will help you understand the basic structure and piece together basic ideas of lists/libraries and what not. This will not help you as developer.
Best bet is to tune to peoples blogs and Microsoft Office Dev community.
SharePoint Maven is great for you giving you a run down on what best practices are and he is pretty current. A lot of good content that deals with on-prem and sharepoint online/office365
https://sharepointmaven.com/blog-sharepoint-best-practices/
Marcs blog has recently gear itself more toward O365 bet there is a lot of good content if youre willing to dig.
https://sympmarc.com/
If youre stuck on SP16 on-prem I would stear clear of SPFx for now. They dont update it as reguarly as the SPFx for online, still using Node 8. That being said still check it out. But another alternative is using react/angular/vue apps inside content editors leveraging the SharePoint API. I do this whenever I can. SPjeff introduced me to this and I can't thank him enough. Check out more info
https://www.spjeff.com/?s=Angular
Lots of good stuff here.
https://veenstra.me.uk/
I dont know any good resources for navigating SharePoint designer. I just learned as I went along. Google will be your best friend in this situation.
If youre going to be doing online work. Check out the Microsoft Dev center.
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/blogs/
Main points are to tune yourself in to SharePoint happenings and updates. The community for on-prem is shrinking so reach out to the blogs as much as possible. Like anything else you just have to dive in.

Is Liferay suitable for an API Documentation Site?

I've been tasked with creating a documentation website for some services that we expose externally. Part of my task is to find out what the best base software would be to build this site. One of my specific objectives is to determine whether or not the Liferay Portal software or its plugins are suitable for building what is primarily functioning as an API documentation website. It seems like Liferay is meant for more content-driving applications, such as news, wikis, blogs, etc.
If Liferay is suitable for this task, are there any pointers on what the general layout should be for the site?
Liferay itself is proving to be rather complicated to learn, so I figured that it'd be better to figure out if I'm wasting my time or not before really diving into learning how to use it.
At the same time, are there any better, non-commercial alternatives?
Thanks!
I am creating web portal using Liferay and I implemented a simple document browsing page. I was using amazon java libraries to accomplish that and it was quite easy(just download all of the jars, include them in your portlet library folder and AWS(AmazonS3) is ready to use). On the other, the programmatic part of creating this portals with Liferay is quite a lot. I suggest you if you don't like programming to chose another software :)
I hope this was helpful! Its just an advice not a concrete answer.
Good luck with developing your website :)

Lotus Notes Application, Web Based Converting

Does anyone have tips or an ebook that can give me a good foundation on how to create applications in lotus notes using web browsers instead of clients. Links or tips are much appreciated.
Thanks!
Books are a good starter. But you'll find there is alot more to it than you see in books. So, here is a quick list of places to look.
Books
You've got these options for books (all downloadable as eBooks to)
Classic Web development prior to Notes 8.5 -- Reviews here and here
Latest Web stuff with Xpages if you have Notes 8.5+ (kindle/paper)
There are IBM wiki's (html). But have found the IBM wiki experience underwhelming. (The adjectives "half-ar$ed" and "piece-meal" comes to mind alot when reading these.)
IBM's redbook site (pdf/html) has better produced content than the wiki's.
Sites
One of the best web development tip/technique sites for the trickier problems is codestore.net and nsftools.com
OpenNtf a well used site for free code and solutions written by alot of smart people.
Quite a few good bloggers have "coagulated" on planetLotus
Try Searching for XPages in Google. Or start here
If you enable http on the server, you should be able to see your domino applications from the web. You then need to modify them to make them a bit more web friendly. The basic technique for this is to have 2 design elements with the same alias, hide one from notes and the other from the web. This will make it a bit easier to make it functional from both the client and the web browser.
Other functionality which makes this a bit easier would be 'Pass through HTML', the Domino CGI Variables and the 'WebQueryOpen' and 'WebQuerySave' events. As Jasper points out, XPages is the new sparkling way to do this, but it might not be an option for existing systems (It requires the latest version of Domino server). Good Luck!
What version of Domino are you running? If it's an 8.5 variant, I would suggest you use XPages to bring your old client apps to the web (XPages are not an option in releases prior to 8.5).
As to how you go about this, that's well beyond the scope of an answer on Stack Overflow: it's a book in and of itself! To learn about web development with XPages, I suggest visiting some of the well-known sites out there, and perhaps picking up a course or two. Here are some links:
http://xpages101.net
http://www.qtzar.com/blogs/qtzar.nsf/htdocs/LearningXPages.htm
http://notesin9.com/
(Also, IBM publish a book on XPages development, although I've not read it).
With regards "classic" Domino development, your best bet is to view your existing Notes app in a web browser and then start hacking on the default HTML generated (which is nasty). The best single resource out there for classic Domino web development tips and hacks is Jake Howlett's Codestore
Start small, build yourself a small database with a subset of data and explore what you can do. I've been a notes client developer for 10+ years and doing domino web work for last three or four years and still on steep learning curve. Its a very powerful platform but you also need to know html as on many occasions the html that you see in the browser helped me pin down the faults in my application code.

What is the profile of a SharePoint developer

I have a development team specialized in ASP.NET. So the solutions we provide are web based, running on IIS and using MS SQL server. Everything within the intranet of the company. The team has this expertise, and they are excellent in C#, and .Net in general.
The company is deploying SharePoint MOSS 2007. This deployment is part of a project that I am not involved in, and for which I have very little information. However I know that they have established the "thinkers" layer (those who will say what to do), the integrations layer (the who will configure, deploy and manage the production), and that they need to establish the so called development layer (those who will do things the other two can't).
I am asked to evaluate the possibility to increase my team's expertise by adding SharePoint development. This is the easy part, I just have to find the required training and send my people.
However these days the word development could mean a lot of things and sometimes I discover that configuration is used in place of development.
I don't have any objections to evolve the team by developing new expertise, but I want to be sure to keep things stimulating for my developers.
Secondly I don't want to say that we have SharePoint development expertise, and actually what we do is just modifying css or xml files. Also, I don't think that using wizards to produce a solution is the best path to push a C# developer to follow.
The questions I am asking myself first is : what is the background of a SharePoint developer? how could .Net developers feel if asked to become SharePoint developers?
Any thoughts will be greatly appreciated.
I started in Sharepoint development over a year ago when I inherited a WSS 3.0 solution at my company.
Personally I think it was a great step for me getting to know Sharepoint development a little, there are a lot of problems (e.g. security, load – balance, ghosting) that was good to see how was solved by the WSS team and helps me solve problems in other solutions I‘m working on. But I don‘t work on WSS solutions full time, so others have to anwer how it is working with WSS every day.
WSS and Sharepoint are an extension on the ASP.NET platform, so any experience in ASP.NET and .NET in general should be a good foundation for a developer that is starting creating Sharepoint solutions. I read the Inside Microsoft Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 book in order to get the basic concepts and wss solution architecuture before I started working on WSS projects.
I quickly found out that you have to have a Virtual Machine environment for Sharepoint development, this is because it‘s a pain working on a client and attaching to a remote process on the server to get in debug mode. Therefore I recommend creating a MOSS virtual machine that has Visual Studio installed that has access to your source control system. Develop solutions on that machine and when finished then check into source control.
I also recommend looking at development tools, such as stsdev and wspbuilder to help you building your solution, these will ease you development process quite a bit. There are also quite a lot of tools available on the web, e.g. codeplex to help you out.
Sometimes it can be a pain developing these solutions, changes can require recycling the IIS pool or a brute-force IISReset, error messages can sometimes by a little cryptic and so on. But you quickly catch on and know where to look. Sharepoint also helps you out a lot, I‘ve had millions of questions from clients that can be solved with standard out-of the box web parts, so that I don‘t have to code anhything to keep my clients happy :)
Sharepoint also expects solutions to be coded in certain way, e.g. 12 hive filestructure so it helps you standardizing your solutions.
There is a serious lack of documentation, so that you have to rely on Reflector and such tools a lot, just to know what is happening within the framework, hopefully this gets better with 2010.
The initial learning curve is high, and a lot of new concepts an technologies to learn ,e.g. Workflows within sharepoint, featuers, ghosting and code access security
There is a lot of Xml configuration that sharepoint uses that developers have to learn, this includes the site definition, list templates and more. There are sometimes days when I‘m stuck in Xml edit mode and can‘t figure out why things don‘t work as they should do
These are just few of my thought, I‘ve been working mainly in WSS development and it would be great if someone could comment regarding web part configuration in Sharepoint, e.g. configuring the search. Which is something I haven‘t been doing a lot of.
From what I have heard around, the SharePoint is a popular technology from the customer point of view, but an object of hatred among developers.
Nice to see you noted Dev and Admin being used "incorrectly".
Although Developing for SharePoint could be purely that, development, like creating webparts etc., I strongly encourage you and your team to get to grips with SharePoint deployment, installation and configuration as well. I am fully SharePoint Certified (WSS Config/Dev and MOSS Config/Dev) and having knowledge of both ends has been invaluable for me.
Knowing what is configured where will help in debugging and troubleshooting along the way. I suggest taking an MCTS WSS 3.0 COnfiguration training / and or a MOSS Config training for at least 1 or 2 of your team. The rest of the team will pick up the essentials as they go along, having those 2 certified colleagues as go to guys concerning config and admin.
IMHO, being a sharepoint consultant entails knowing how to create a piece of functionality as a dev and then being able to deploy, configure and maintain that piece of functionality as an admin (or at least an informed end/power user).
Albert, take a look at this other thread titled Is a sharepoint developer technically “equipped” to do custom app dev and vise-versa. There's quite a bit of info in there about what's involved in making the leap from pure .NET to SharePoint.
My co-worker is studying SharePoint at the moment. Making fun of him all the time. Frequently he gabbles something like "wtf is that??!!". And then i feel a bit sad, because i know - there's a probability that i'll have to learn that stuff too (i guess it's not so easy to get projects nowadays).
I see it more as configuration and customization than software development (something like hunting down fing checkbox for 3 days in a row). You pick up some clay through those crazy sharepoint designers and then endlessly customize it.
For everything i know already - there's a new name (i.e. - spGridView) and unexpected behavior underneath.
Html that gets rendered is bizzare (tables and bunch of serialized viewstate everywhere).
But those configuration xml`s... o_0
Now that's a hurdle i can't get over. Even hardcore SQL stuff starts to seem like a childish game.
Maybe i'm wrong, but as i have heard - Microsoft developed 'spatial columns' (let's you expand count of columns for tables over thousandsomething) for sql mainly because of Sharepoint. That terrifies me.
Of course - my opinion is HIGHLY subjective and a bit offensive. But i hope that helps to better reveal what i think & feel about Sharepoint.
Hopefully developers you are working with sees this different.
In short:
No. I wouldn't like to become a sharepoint developer.
Edit:
I could handle that initial complexity. But the main reason i don't want to - i don't think that development in Sharepoint is the right way to go. I mean - lately people discuss that webforms provides too much abstraction. Then what to say about Sharepoint?
To be a successful SharePoint developer you must have a high threshold for pain and the patience of a Buddha.
thank you all for the answers, they are all really helpful.
from what I read here, I see two things to consider.
First is the context of utilization which I think is an important factor. In some places SharePoint "development" could go very far, and could involve developing really exciting things, in order to satisfy new customers' needs. it could involve writing code and so on. And in some other places it could be just administration and configuration, in order to maintain already established solutions.
Secondly is the personal motivation. It really depends on the person. Some .Net developers with good experience, will prefer not to go in a direction, where they will not code the "SharePoint way", and will like to write code in C# or some other languages. However there will be others that will choose this path and will be happy to have such careers. They will be motivated and thus propose really nice solutions.
For example, from my personal perspective and if I had stayed in development and programming, I would not choose SharePoint development using high level wizards and menus,as a progress path for my career. Even though I am not doing it these days, I still enjoy coding, compiling, debugging etc, but this is just me.

Which development platform should I use for desktop Windows application?

After doing web development for quite a while, I am faced with a new client who wants a simple database application to run outside the interweb.
He is quite adamant about using Microsoft products. "We don't want no steenking open sources" was his stance.
It's been quite a while since I actually did desktop development, and most of my tools are rusty, out of licence, or just plain lost. I have been concentrating lately on L.A.M.P. applications, but that doesn't quite transfer back to the desktop environment.
Some options:
database: MySql (my fav), Access, MSSql
language: C++, VB, PHP, Java, C#
I have been gravitating towards Access/VisualBasic, not because I like it very much, but because it is simple to set up and deploy. A database server (MySql, MsSql) would probably be too hard to deploy/maintain for the novice computer user. Even though from a purist point of view, C++ is the better language, it would take too much effort to bootstrap an application (IMHO). Java is too cumbersome (again IMHO).
The other consideration is cost. Although I can convince him to acquire proper software runtime licences, I probably won't be able to get him to purchase necessary development tools, and certainly the project isn't paying enough to justify substantial purchases which will probably not be used again.
I would appreciate your input on platform selection, development tools and application frameworks, thanx muchly.
Edit 23-May-09
Thank you everyone for your excellent advice.
I have settled on C# Express. So far, I've avoided learning C#, but what's another language?; and I have a whole week to get up to speed.
I am waffling on whether to go with Access or MSSql (Express) database. With Access, I can deploy the database as a stand-alone file, but MSSql requires that the database server be installed. (AFAIK)
The client requires that the application be installed in multiple locations, some of which are mobile and not connected to the interweb. The dicey part is reconciling all the copies of the database, and determining which is the connonical version.
I'd go with the Express editions of C# and MSSQL. Free and easy to use/set up/deploy. Here's a deeper link to some general material specifically about using VS Express editions for Windows applications.
I suggest: Just use Access. It works for small, simple, single user databases. It's not "just a database" it's also a "database application" and "database application development environment" in it's own right. That is: It's ridiculously quick and easy to throw together a db, CRUD forms, and simple reports; and the built-in VBA is handles most business logic, and you can allways call-out to C# dll's if you need to do anything "interesting".
Just tell the customer they need to loan you the production box for the duration of development (fair enough), and that Access (no need to mention which version) is about $200.00.
Customers who don't pay get they get what they ask for, not what they need.
C# + MSAccess/MSSql(express) = Profit.
I don't know exactly your requirements, but I would suggest the following:
If you had the budget:
Visual Studio Professional
MS SQL or Access
DevExpress Components for forms and
database persistence.
If you don't have the budget
Visual Studio Express
MySql
NHibernate or Linq2Entities
WPF or Windows Forms
I don't know why you think another database engine would be easier to administer than MS SQL. There's a free-as-in-beer edition of MS SQL called 'Express' that might suit. It supports all the same DDL and SQL features as the full database engine: in case you need them; it's just limited in size and number of CPUs.
Likewise there are free/express edition of the developer tools, which aren't missing much functionality (most notably perhaps the ability to write an installation program, but there are other free ways to do that). I don't know PHP or Java but if I were given a choice between C++ and C# (I'm familiar with both), I'd say that C# is virtually as capable for most applications except perhaps soft-real-time, and is quite a bit easier and more pleasant.
My preference would be C# with MSSQL Express. You can use the visual studio express edition for your development environment.
Have you considered Delphi or C++Builder there are free versions available.
Microsoft Visual Studio has express editions which are either cheap or free. That said, the choice is obvious: Winforms with C# or Visual Basic .Net (it's just a syntax question) talking to a MySql backend (for cost issues).
Microsoft Winforms is awesome but limited to Windows (Mono notwithstanding). Enjoy the project. It's way more fun than LAMP in my opinion, but not nearly as universal.
Edit: If you have the extra time and patience (of course you would have to eat the hours and not bill the learning time), though C# is brilliant and very mature (even in .Net 1.1 it was :), you may want to write the app in one of the Python variants for .Net. That's what I would do... Python has a huge following and will probably come up sometime in your non-Microsoft future. C# on the other hand... well, if you Mono it could come up, but otherwise, it's like learning Italian: good in Italy, but useless otherwise. (I should know, I'm writing this from my place in Venice...)
C# or VB.Net with SQLite.Net for the database. Pretty much cross platform across the board.
If you need a database local, one file (.dat) or the suggested from one's IDE (berkeleydb) or Sphinxsearch() Relevance sort order with pivot tables are often what users want and no database required only i/o according to document or graphics type.
If you are developing application on desktop. I would say
Scripting Language:ASP.NET(C#)
Database: MS SQL 2005
Server: Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6

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