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This is one of the more anticipated toolkits after release 5 of Lotus Notes. It's main purpose is to expose Notes data as XML data. In short you can export almost any type of Notes data as XML, even binary images, file attachments and all kinds of difficult stuff. The result is an XML file. Combine the XML file with Lotus's own DTD and you have an almost complete XML representation of Notes data as XML. The DXL is an abbreviation for Domino XML and means "the way Notes writes XML". You can, with the good help of the DTD, decode the XML and transform it to whatever you like with for example XSLT.
Not only can you export Notes data to XML, but you can also import XML data to Notes!
I saw an extremely powerful demonstration at Lotusphere 2000 where Ned Batchelder (author of NotesPeek, and hard core developer) demod the following: With the DXL toolkit's application dxlexport, he exported a complete Lotus Notes database to XML. He then deleted the Notes database from the file system. Finally he completely recreated the Notes database with the dxlimport-tool. All documents and design where in place! This demo showed the tremendous power of the DXL toolkit. Finally the development community had a way to export both design and documents to a highly modifiable format (XML!), do your changes, and reimport.
The DXL toolkit contains both the applications dxlexport and dxlimport to perform the above tasks. In addition you'll find the programming components in the form of header and library files to incorporate DXL processing in your own applications.
List Fields utilizes the DXL toolkit to manipulate the rich text fields it processes.
From Notes 6 most of the features in the Lotus XML Toolkit are built in to Notes itself. This means that not only will you get DXL functionality in Notes directly, but you will also get support for XML parsing and XSLT transformation directly from within the support classes. The Lotus XML toolkit will therefore be discontinued after Notes 6.