Priority Pink!!

As I mentioned at Connect 2017, the band is back together again!  I have taken on the role of Chief Architect of Connections AppDev, Middleware, and Project LiveGrid, and I am so happy to be working in the app dev space again.  They say home is where the heart is, and app dev is my programming heart's home.  Even better, I get to work with many of the folks from the Domino Designer and XPages team again, and writing code again with these folks is a joy.  We share a vision, and we are all excited to be part of the Pink story.

As we look to the work for Connections Pink, we see a lot of important things we need to do to make Pink a powerful platform for developers.  The APIs need to be brought into the second decade of this century*, all the componentry built for Pink must be extensible, the app catalog and extension manager need to evolve to support those extensions, and we need a situational app builder to allow everyone to add value to their collaboration.

We've been looking at the best way to move the Social Business Toolkit forward with the Pink vision.  The SBT is a great idea - it makes the current Connections APIs much easier to use, and also helps to streamline the authentication process.   With all our team has to do for Pink, though, we feel that the community is a better guardian of the toolkit at this time.  Several of the forks of the code from the OpenNTF repository are already ahead of the internal version.  It is complex to manage internal and external versions of the toolkit, and we feel it is time to make the https://github.com/OpenNTF/SocialSDK version of the toolkit the definitive, single source for the toolkit.  The community has already contributed much to the SBT, and we expect that working together on a single, shared, and open repository will be more efficient for all of us.

As Pink evolves, and new APIs become available, the toolkit will also need to evolve.  We can do this work together in the OpenNTF project, with the community's input and participation, to ensure that the toolkit continues to make it easy to work with Connections APIs.  I'd really like to hear which pieces of the toolkit people find most valuable and what may be missing.  Let's continue the conversation here:  https://github.com/OpenNTF/SocialSDK/wiki


 * I feel compelled to say that even as Pink reworks the Connections APIs, the current APIs will continue to work - breaking applications is not what we do or who we are!!