Deployed as Beta on OpenNTF: XSnippets - Next Generation Code Bin

Frank van der Linden, Serdar Basegmez, Bruce Elgort and I (Niklas Heidloff) have made some progress with XSnippets, the next generation of the OpenNTF code bin.

We introduced this project in a blog entry some time ago. Today we make XSnippets available as beta on OpenNTF: http://openntf.org/xsnippets

The application is rather simple. While we intend to deliver more functionality like comments and ratings, other parts have been kept simple on purpose. For example there is no rich text field for comments, only one language per snippet, etc.

Hopefully the application is self explanatory. If not and for defects, we'd appreciate your feedback in the project's defects, discussions and feature requests areas: http://xsnippets.openntf.org

One interesting feature is the popular snippets view. When users copy snippets to the clipboard we track this. The most popular snippets are the snippets that have been copied most often in the last three months.

It's also possible to embed snippets in blogs and other web sites. In this case only the actual snippet (without meta data) is displayed in an iFrame. We hope that developers utilize this feature to post snippets on OpenNTF and then explain the embedded snippets in their blogs.

Every user can navigate to snippets and open them. However only approved OpenNTF contributors who have signed CLAs (contributor license agreements) can actually create new snippets. We enforce this already now in the beta so that we can keep these snippets for future production usage. If contributors want to try creations please mark the snippets with the word "Test" as part of the name.

For users who are not approved contributors here is screenshot of the creation user interface: