At GXOpen, users transform the GeneXus business objects in
projects that can be freely used by other members of the community. Business
objects are pieces of a knowledge base that enable developers to have part of
the application code already done.
More than 54,000 downloads have been made from the Web
site www.gxopen.com. This site has
everything, from the utility program needed to carry out a specific operation to
full GeneXus knowledge bases.
Cristhian Gómez is one of the most active users of the
GXOpen community that involves 9,000 people. He works in the support and
development area of BNC Informatics, and says he never begins to work on a new
project without first visiting GXOpen.
He became a member of the community when GeneXus 7.5 was
released. He wanted to work with examples of the new features offered by the
tool, such as XML management. "Sometimes, the programmer needs somebody to take
an interest in what he does, somebody to give an opinion and collaborate," he
explains.
"When I have to do something, I first take a look at
GXOpen to check if it hasn't been done already," states Gómez. "I've found some
features that have saved me a lot of developing time. For example, the
possibility of validating e-mail addresses, the auto-number property, and the
identity card number authentication," he points out.
As it has been so useful to him, he concludes there must
be people in the same situation, and therefore uploads his own projects to the
GXOpen Web site. He has shared 14 projects with the GXOpen community. The
largest project, the one that took more developing time, was an email client. It
was not the most popular project, though. "You use a nice title for a project
and everybody downloads it, but it's only three code lines long," he says,
referring to another of his projects, called Splash. The DBMS manuals he
uploaded were also very popular. He uploaded them at the GXOpen Web site because
he had become very frustrated when searching Database manuals.
His most recent proposal is to build an Unauthorized
GeneXus Bible. "The idea is to document everything about GeneXus to spread the
tool," he explains. GeneXus offers a lot of technical information, but people
need things told like a story, so the idea is to use another language to
document everything related to GeneXus, from its beginning to the last version
features, he points out.
The collaboration among the GXOpen community goes beyond
the fact of sharing code lines. Consultations among users are common. Gómez says
that he has received questions he didn't have the answers for, but he conducted
the necessary research to be able to reply.