Jack Ratcliff

Thanks to Anil and Bruce, you can download the 0.1.3 beta version of Domino Web Tools.

I posted the template last week but had some issues with the security on the document that Anil fixed. Bruce then came to my rescue and changed the status flag to "Released". Hopefully, everyone can now see and download this template and start playing with it. It was done in Designer 6 so you won't be able to open it in an R5 client. Hopefully before Lotusphere I'll have a version that will work on both an R5 server and a D6 server.

So what's new in this release? Glad you asked. The major thing done with this release was to rewrite all of the xml/xslt processing to use the cross-browser ECMAScript library from the Sarissa project. This means that the web views portion of Domino Web Tools will now work in Mozilla based browsers (Firefox, Netscape, etc.). That even means Macs!. This is all client side script and thus no extra processing on the server takes place. Use the power of all the PCs/Macs is what I say!

So, if you have a chance, give it a try and let me know what you think about it. If you don't have the time to download the template and try it for yourself. I have an online demo you can try. Don't be too critical of the appearance of the demo. What I'm demonstrating are various views that are loaded with the domino view?ReadViewEntries command and along with the data from the view?ReadDesign command, an xsl transformation is done to format the view in html. With this approach, you no longer have to write your own html views. The eventual goal is to have any view that can work in the Notes Client to be rendered equally as well in a browser (along with the same functionality you get when working with views in the notes client). There's still plenty of work to do (calendar views, eliminating the need for previous/next links, expanding multiple categories, etc.) but I think we'll get there.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention that the navigation menu you see on the left side of the online demo is just an outline that is done in the designer client. I'm using the outline?ReadEntries command to get the xml generated from the outline. The cool part for outlines is that the expanding and collapsing never goes back to the server. A normal outline done with Notes/Domino and embedded on a page and then rendered to a browser as html does a round trip to the server for each expand/collapse. Another improvement to the outline processing that Domino Web Tools provides, is that the html generated is not a table with tr and td tags like what Domino gives you. Instead, I generate an unordered list using ul and li tags. As a result, I can go any level deep without skewing the appearance of the list. Additionally, there are plenty of css code out there to style lists in a very pleasing way.