“What do you get when you combine a passion for the Notes/
Domino platform with the spirit of open source? You get OpenNTF
(http://www.openntf.org). Based on Nathan Freeman’s vision dating
back to the R5 beta cycle in 1998, and on the more recent addition
of Bruce Elgort’s organizational flair, OpenNTF has a stated
mission ‘to provide applications for Lotus Notes as open source
which may be freely distributed, to increase the awareness of the
power of Notes.’“There’s a wide variety of open source projects, and Nathan
Freeman says he’s always looking to expand the list. ‘Mail template
modifications are a big one. Messaging is so critical to the
operation of so many Notes shops, but at the same time, its use is
very personal and specific to a given user. So we’re putting a lot
of focus on super-configuration on mail. That’s seeing some great
payoff, and will see a bit more with our OpenNTF Notes 6 mail
template.’“But mail templates are hardly the only applications. Freeman
continues, ‘The other big area is development tools–enablers that
cut development time for Domino apps. XML/XSLT abstractors,
workflow templates, Crimson are designed to make it easier and
faster for Domino shops to build and deploy new tools. Developers
like to build things that save them from a lot of work later. We
also like to solve really hard problems and show off the
results…'”
[Editor’s Note: In related news, IBM has just announced the
availability of a free trial version of the Domino 6 Gold release
for Linux.
According to a blurb contributed to Linux Today: “Some of
the major features include: HTTP 1.1 persistent connections,
improved session handling, better denial of service attack
handling, custom tag library for those developers developing J2EE
applications, activity logging enhancement to include more detailed
information about Notes sessions, create multiple instances of the
Domino server, each with its own program directory, on a single
UNIX machine, and an automatic fault recovery feature is
available.”
The trial software may be
downloaded from the IBM site. A
technical overview is also available.]