Over the weekend we lost another long-standing member of the Domino community, Nathan T Freeman. Nathan was outgoing, often controversial, but passionate about open source and helping others. Everyone who met him will have stories about him. But I know he is one of the individuals I have to thank for being where I am today.
In my last blog post I talked about challenges we had to overcome as a team with regard to caching of constants. But a bigger challenge we hit was caching of design elements.
Part of the solution we built required copying design elements from one database to another. Part of the beauty of Domino is that everything is a Note - including design elements. Design elements are just Notes with a special flag. So just as you can copy a document from one database to another by getting a handle on the note, you can also copy a design element from one database to another by getting a handle on the design note. The API is exactly the same - Call NotesDocument.copyToDatabase(targetDb).
Recently I've been involved in a project with a lot of LotusScript. As a team our approach has been to structure the code according to best practices and leveraging what we've learned from other languages. Standards are always good, but there are always peculiarities that impact what you do. The crucial skill is to be able to work out what is happening when the standard ways don't produce expected results. And most importantly, work out how to work around them.
There are a number of challenges when it comes to two-way REST and Domino. But one of the biggest challenges for manipulation between NotesDateTime objects and JSON is timezone handling. There is an Product Ideas request to provide serialization / deserialization between Domino objects and JSON strings, which surprisingly only has 31 votes, but it's not there yet. So for Volt MX LotusScript Toolkit, this needs handling within the toolkit itself.
Earlier this week Jason Roy Gary announced the Volt MX LotusScript Toolkit. It's important to put some background to manage expectations. There will be an OpenNTF webinar on December 17th where we will explain more about our aims for the project and provide a call-to-arms to the community to join us driving this forward. I encourage everyone to attend if you're interested in using Agents outside the Notes Client or a Form's WebQueryOpen and WebQuerySave methods. But in advance, let's cover some questions I expect people to have.