Ben Poole starts his recent blog posting The DXL buzz with “Got to love those freaky coincidences”, and I know what he means. Suddenly I’m hearing more about these two creations of mine, DXL and NotesPeek.

For those not from the Notes/Domino world, DXL is an XML representation of a Notes database, and NotesPeek is an interactive viewer for Notes data. At a certain level, they are very similar: walk over a Notes database, and express everything found in an unambiguous authoritative form. For DXL, the form is XML. For NotesPeek, the form is on-screen display. Of course, DXL also allows you to perform the inverse: read XML and create Notes data (though I didn’t write that half of it, Dave Schlesinger did the original code).

So here’s some stuff that happened recently about DXL and NotesPeek:

• Bruce Elgort recently asked Do you DXL?
• Damien’s thoughts about Domino as the perfect blogging tool ended up at building tools with DXL.
• Mac Guidera pointed me at his new tool DXLPeek, which roughly speaking, is NotesPeek reimplemented on top of DXL. It sounds very cool, and I will have to get around to trying it this week.

But the thing that happened that struck me most forcefully was the most unexpected. Recently Rob McDonagh did me a great kindness just because I wrote NotesPeek and DXL. I haven’t worked on these projects in over four years. And suddenly out of the blue, a stranger reached out to me to thank me for that work. It’s a great feeling to have your work acknowledged in that way. Thanks, Rob.