Why I'd Love To See Full DXL Support in Lotus Notes
Wednesday, February 4, 2009 1:17 PM
At the 'Ask The Developers' session at Lotusphere the first questions was one that the developers were expected and that was to fix DXL in Lotus Notes. Now Brent Peters has detailed on his blog that it is being looked into.
[Question: Nathan Freeman. We need DXL fidelity. How many developers do you have assigned to it and when will we get it?
Response: We are shifting people to DXL now. We have much feedback on this. Focus has been Designer and xpages. We will be rolling features out incrementally rather than a 2 year wait time.
Post Lotusphere 09 answer - This work is currently staffed. Designs being vetted, would like to push the DETAILS of effort in a DP call. Looking at what can be done for first incarnation in 8.5.1. One items is to ensure no crashes.
]
Well I'm not a design partner so unfortunately I won't get to find out about the details of efforts or even give any suggestions on what I'd like to see in the 8.5.1 incarnation but I can blog about it here in the hope that somebody who is part of the DP process might spot it and pass it on to those who need to know...
One of the great things about DXL is that you could use it to build forms or views in a database on the fly. Basically most design elements could be created while the application was still running. In theory you could get some basic info from an end user and use that information to build customized forms and views etc. This is extremely powerful when you start thinking in terms of plugins for Lotus Notes applications. We already have plugins for the Notes client, The sidebar and even the SameTime client so why not plugins for applications.
Take the BlogSphere blog template for example, lets say you want to add in a new sideblock. With full DXL support in Lotus Notes it could be possible that somebody else has already created the sideblock that you need and published it in a plugins catalog for Blogsphere, you download a set of DXL documents, import them into your database and bingo, the blog template now has a new sideblock type. Take this a little further and one of the DXL items you import into the database could be a document to say the plugin is installed and then have code in your target database to allow you to 'disable' plugins on the fly also.
Yes, something like this would need a little bit of background work, some naming scheme would have to be developed for the target database so plugins don't overlap but with full DXL support for EVERY design element available you could develop some serious plugin support for your applications and this is just one of the reasons I'd love to see full DXL support in Notes/Domino in the future.