DomBlog.de - Notes, Domino and Stuff

We have been playing around with LotusScript.doc, a tool by Mikkel Heisterberg to create a documentation of LotusScript code in a Notes database. Overall it looks quite good, even without modifiying the code of the database the tool created a nice Javadoc-Style documentation of the LotusScript code.

The documentation syntax is very similar to Javadoc. LotusScript.doc currently supports seven @-parameters and can be used in most design elements.

If our further tests are successful we will probably switch our documentation style to that syntax. If you are not using a standardised documentation format for your LotusScript code (esp. for the header) yet this is a good start anyway.

Even though it crashes on one of our more complex databases (see below) and does not yet work 100% it seems quite promising. An enhancement I would like to see is the option to extend/configure it, e.g. to add new @-parameters.

LotusScript.doc will be available in two editions, the free community edition (the one we are testing) and a commercial edition which is yet to be released.

JSDoc

We have also begun to use JSDoc to document our JavaScript code. It is not that well suited for Domino based web development since it is a Perl tool which can only be applied to .js files but is is still very handy to create a nice documentation of JavaScript Libraries for example.

Update (26.01.2006)

As mentioned above, LotusScript.doc crashes on one of our applications. To find the reason, I met up with Mikkel at Lotusphere and we took a deeper look into it. We tried to export the whole database design to DXL using a simple agent and saw the Notes client crash with a red box of death. I went to the developer's lab and spoke to Dick Annicchiarico. Looking at the NSD file he remembered a bug in the DXLExporter (SPR #DANO67JPRX) which is fixed in release 7.0 and will be fixed in release 6.5.6. Since our development server needs to be release 6 for the time being (most of our clients have not migrated their environment yet) we will have to wait a little longer but nevertheless will keep on documenting.