so.. Laurette and I have added openslice to the register of applications on OpenNTF

We were going to do it beforehand, but I guess we just wanted to meet with Bruce Elgort et al and make sure that it was the sort of thing they were looking for - it's kind of weird to put something out there as we're not proposing that it's the great "be all and end all" but just something that we find useful. We've used it at a few company sites now and one of the major benefits we've found is that when we find a new way of doing something, we just fix the underlying code and replace the template - it's kind of like having all your modularised, generic code in a template so you can update it quickly (as well as the keyword management etc)

It's only been something like 24 hours since we put it up and we've already seen an increase in activity so I hope some of you have had a look and find it useful.

We're in the USA for the next few weeks on holiday, so (as geeky as this sounds) if anyone wants a session on it to help explain what it is, then we're happy to oblige - as long as you're either in Washington, New York, San Fransisco or Las Vegas - other than that and you may have to wait until next year if we find the funds to come back to Lotusphere 2007 - or you can visit Sydney if you like!

With openslice we've included a function which will allow you to have a global variable without actually having a global variable. Let's assume that you've read about and agree with the readability issues relating to global variables and continue to the process (if you haven't read about it go to the top of my "don't" list for Lotus Notes/Domino development, if you have read about it but don't agree - read on and see what you think anyway).

Instead of creating a global variable, openslice utilises a function called "ltStatic" which allows the programmer to effectively load a value as a static variable and retrieve it at a later time in the program. It seems that many people aren't quite sure how static variables work so we've created the function in an attempt to try and make it a little more usable.

The function works by storing the variable in a static List, where it will sit waiting for you to retrieve it with a similar call.

...more »

well... it's been a bit of a long haul over the last couple of months as project work and a few personal things have taken precedence over the finalisation of the openslice beta, but as of the 1st of the 1st 2006, we're out there.

What is openslice? well... there's a bit of doco on the site itself, but essentially, Laurette and myself have been doing Notes development for a while now, and when we started our own consulting company liquidtoast we decided it was time to combine some of our efforts and create a consistent application basis for all our future work. It's basically the first application slice we employ before building the actual application containing all the standard things we seem to be building over and over again - keywords, database links, counter documents, error messages and a form configuration document to help setup some fundamental things on forms (action buttons, validation, auditing and some general UI configuration).

Since then, we've built a number of application on an ever evolving application "slice", and we decided that instead of keeping it to ourself, others might find it useful - we hope you do.

Oh and one more thing... it's free... so download it and see what you think - if nothing else there's about 300+ functions that might be handy.