XFORMS -- Then and Now

Micah Dubinko's Ten Favorite XForms Engines summarized the landscape two years ago. This spring he summarized his current favorites.

A more complete summary of current work is available from W3C.

XForms can help pretty much any application surrounding using html forms, but its value is much broader because for message and document centric applications, it provides a nice fit for many problem domains such as B2B and catalog workshop. It would probably be a nice foundation for a set of product (as in software product) configuration tools -- Spring, Cocoon/Leyna, JBoss, Tomcat, Hibernate, JLibrary, etc.

From an application developer's standpoint it allows a combination of workflow support with rich data -- including a persistent form of object graphs.

Form Faces is an especially interesting implementation because it offers platform independent XForms and thereby avoids the standard Microsoft end run around standards -- Infopath.

Summary of a technical presentation of an XForms use:

The difficulty of developing and deploying commercial web applications increases as the number of technologies they use increases and as the interactions between these technologies become more complex. This paper describes a way to avoid this increasing complexity by re-examining the basic requirements of web applications. Our approach is to first separate client concerns from server concerns, and then to reduce the interaction between client and server to its most elemental: parameter passing. We define a simplified programming model for form-based web applications and we use XForms and a subset of J2EE as enabling technologies. We describe our implementation of an MVC-based application builder for this model, which automatically generates the code needed to marshal input and output data between clients and servers. This marshalling uses type checking and other forms of validation on both clients and servers. We also show how our programming model and application builder support the customization of web applications for different execution targets, including, for example, different client devices.

[Using XForms to Simplify Web Programming, by Richard Cardone, Danny Soroker, Alpana Tiwari of the IBM Watson Research Center. Available from the ACM Portal

A few implementations...

• Form Faces is based upon pure JavaScript providing platform independent XForms and thereby avoids the standard Microsoft end run around standards -- Infopath.
• Chiba is a java/xlst based server engine that works with existing browsers. Distributions exist for tight integration with Cocoon, . The Chiba Cookbook is especially interesting, because the designers intent and basic usage patterns are explained clearly.
• Deng is an XForms browser implemented in Macromedia's Flash/ActionScript.
• X-Smiles is an entire Java based browser supporting XForms and other emerging W3C technology. While it supports browsing on conventional devices, its orientation is toward exotic devices.
• Manifest is an xml based content management system ,supporting XForms through a Chiba integration. It uses MS Office products to generate the content, transforming it to XML suitable for a Chiba-enabled Java application server. The balance between the familiarity of Office and the power of an open back end is appealing. Can CSS page designers do enough customization for great layout? Probably, especially if it is possible to capture the XML into a Cocoon style pipeline at some point.