Genii Weblog

The joys of intellectual property

Thu 10 Mar 2011, 05:38 PM



by Ben Langhinrichs
I have been developing software extensions for Lotus Notes for a long time. No, I mean a really long time. Sometimes it makes me vaguely ill to think about, but sometimes I have to feel good about the positive side of all that effort:

Almost every time I set out to write something new, I already have code to do much of what I want. Even if I never anticipated that specific task, I have intellectual property everywhere, and there's almost always a solution I've written somewhere that will help with the new task.

Thus, I set out earlier today, around noon, to implement both the GetAsText and SetAsText methods I mentioned in my earlier post. I put in the basic framework using code I developed to make adding Midas methods easier. I then looked around and found internal methods to get text from rich text fields with various parameters, and to get text from file resources with different parameters. I found internal methods to put them back. I cobbled it all together, and now have a working prototype that implements that script I wrote earlier (copied below). It works pretty well. Once I clean up some of my CopyWithDependencies method, which also uses a heck of a lot of existing code, I'll send the whole thing off to Ulrich so he can see how it works.

With more than fifteen years of code saved up, it is pretty easy to do almost anything. Perhaps tomorrow I'll tackle turning Notes docs into PDF or making Midas into an OSGi plugin.

Copyright © 2011 Genii Software Ltd.

What has been said:


983.1. Roy Rumaner (03/11/2011 02:23 AM)

Ben can you create a function that will write my code for me? I want to be able to tell it what I want verbally and have it spit out a completely bug free product. Now that would sell


983.2. Ben Langhinrichs (03/11/2011 03:26 AM)

If I could write it, I wouldn't sell it. I'd sell all the completely bug free products myself and put you out of business. (Mercenary SOB that I am)