Thu 16 May 2002's Blog

DXL = All Domino design and content described in XML format as prescribed by the Domino DTD. An example of DXL is the ?ReadViewEntries View URL command we're all used to by now. As another example, this image shows the DXL that describes the design of the Contact form from the iNotes template

Here's a scenario - Somebody asks me if they can see how I designed the "All" view in a particular database. Do I a) Zip and send the whole database or b) Create a new database, copy in the "All" view and mail this database? Usually the latter. In Domino 6 there's no need. You can export the view as a DXL file and simply mail that file for the user to import at the other end.

What got me excited (not that I'll ever get round to doing anything about it) is that you can, in theory, create a Domino Designer "Lite". By this I mean something that only includes the things I use as a pure Domino developer - Forms, Subforms, Views, Pages, Fields, Agents, Computed-Text and a subset of the @Formula language. What I don't need are things like - Outlines, Navigators, Framesets, Actions, Hotspots/Buttons, Layout-Regions, Sections, Tables, Styles, Date Picket, Folder Pane, Group Scheduler etc etc. Just imagine a designer client that never crashed.

The possibilies are almost endless. It's not only design elements, you can get the DXL to every document in a database. You can search/replace these and post the result back. You could serve every page from a database from one servlet that uses Xalan to translate the DXL in to HTML that you have complete control over. If you though you could forget the whole XML thing. Think again and get learning now. I know I am..

Stephen Neal was our man at the Domino Bootcamp this week. Hopefully he'll have lots of juicy gossip. They spoke about DXL quite a bit apparently.