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Heegaard-Floer homology, a family of three-manifold invariants inspired by gauge theory, has proved remarkably successful at resolving classical questions in low-dimensional topology. (For example, it detects the genus of a knot, gives bounds for the slice genus, detects tight contact structures, and behaves well with respect to surgeries.) Unfortunately, Heegaard-Floer homology remains difficult to compute. In this talk, after discussing some of the its formal structure we will outline an alternate construction of Heegaard-Floer homology and sketch how this construction can be used to give invariants of 3-manifolds with parametrized boundary. We hope that the invariants for three-manifolds with boundary will prove useful for computations of the closed invariants.