After what seems like many a year, the W3C has announced the release of the "recommendation" for XForms 1.0. This represents "the final step in acceptance and publishing of the standard". Microsoft will be releasing InfoPath next week, which brings XML to the office suite. Adobe is helping to bring XML to PDF, and other companies are joining in too.

Will developers start developing with XForms? Or will we be using good ole basic HTML forms, no matter how limiting?

Read E-forms standard finalized

I thought about using XForms recently, but the lack of clients or viewers is a problem. At one point Mozilla talked about adding XForms viewers, but I don't think it went anywhere. Are there reasonable clients, browswer plugins, or anything to use this reasonably?

Here is the link to list of implementations on W3C. There are some plugins for IE and there is a pending Bug request for Mozilla.


http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/

I guess this is what you wanted to know. Correct me if I am wrong.

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Are there reasonable clients, browswer plugins, or anything to use this reasonably?

Ten Favorite XForms Engines

XForms is supported in the OXF XML platform (http://www.orbeon.com/oxf/).

The approach in OXF is to let the application developer describe the form with XForms, and have OXF automatically convert this description into straight HTML. Then the end user fills the HTML form, submits it, and from the submitted data OXF creates an XML document (the XForms instance) that can be used by the application. More on this in the OXF documentation:

http://www.orbeon.com/oxf/doc/processors-xforms

<obvious advertorial>
Novell is coming out with some great Xforms based development tools which allow you to generate Xforms views in a visual way (true drag 'n drop development) and deploy them as a JSR 168 portlet onto Novell's exteNd Director portal product, which supports the Novell, BEA, and IBM appservers...

Take a look at http://beta.novell.com/public.jsp to get access to the public beta software. Download the installer (395MB - ouch), run setup, go for a cup of coffee, and 20 minutes later it's all rocking and rolling ;-) ...

Cheers

Rik Van Bruggen
Novell Inc.
</obvious advertorial>

If you're interested in reading up on XForms, I've put together a XForms Bookshelf over at the XUL Alliance site. See http://xul.sourceforge.net/books.html#xforms for details.

 - Gerald

I am quite puzzled by some of the postings that claim to "support"
XForms. From what I see, they only support XForms as a development
time representation. So what? That I am free to move between development
tools may be the only benefit, if any. This might enable "web agencies"
to provide XForms GUIs instead of the usual Javascript stuff they did
up til now. That of course requires that a generator is available to the
actual platform - most likely not plain html but another UI framework
system,like JSF, .NET etc.
If on the other hand, I am developing the drag-and-drop way, plain
and simple, I do not care if the representation is XForms, JSP Taglibs,
.NET componentents etc.

What are they talking about?
InfoPath is RTM is long time ago but
it's not XForms compatible and using IE behaviors based approach=
custom microsoft solution for xml edit/validation/presentation(through xsl).

I am not familiar with XForms, though I tried to look into it about a year ago... can someone tell me - is it intended for Web Browser presented forms only, or is it presentation technology independent?

Does XForms include a standard for persisting form submissions etc etc?

cheers,
Markus

XForms is used in the upcoming XHTML 2.0, but it has been designed so it could be used in other markup languages. Future browsers are expected to understand XForms natively, as they support XHTML 2.0. But as XForms is not purely tied to XHTML 2.0, right now server-side XForms processors are available and applications targeting current browser are built today with XForms.

Alex

Future browsers are expected to understand XForms natively, as they support XHTML 2.0.

I expect the same with SVG: "The charter of the SVG Working Group includes determining how to combine XForms and SVG."

Does anybody know whether, or should the Servlet spec will be updated to support XForms? And I don't mean generating XForms based forms, I mean on the return trip, when XForms instances are being submitted as XML documents. The good old getParam() methods that worked well for name/value pair fields won't be too much help here. Does it make sense to integrate something like XPATH into the Servlets API, or use something like JAXB, or both, or none of the above?