Open Slice is an application framework for Lotus Notes applications. It is not an application itself, but rather the bottom layer of any application – the first slice of your application sandwich if you will. Open Slice is designed to provide most of the basic elements that any Notes application requires. This allows developers to skip the basic stuff, and get right to the “meat” of the application.

While there may be some new things, many things within Open Slice will be familiar, particularly to developers who have built up their own repositories of code over the years. So then the question should be asked – what does Open Slice give me that I don’t already have? The answer to this is that Open Slice provides a single consistent approach to all of these common elements, and an easy mechanism for updating these elements across multiple applications. It helps to eliminate variations in coding techniques between different developers, and most importantly it will save you time. Finally, because it is open source, it allows you to see the code and continue to build and use your own code libraries right along side the Open slice framework.

In addition to the basic framework, over time Open Slice will continue to evolve with additional application objects (MS Word reporting, Organisation Hierarchy Processing), and complete applications (document library, discussion database) based on the Open Slice foundation.