XForms Everywhere

It is with great pleasure that we are announcing that XML Processing Model Working Group meetings have started as of last Thursday. The working group consists of about a dozen of individuals all convinced that a standard XML processing language is a necessary building stone in the XML world, and at Orbeon we are looking forward to making our best to help make that happen.

While the deliverable of the working group will certainly not be exactly XPL, we do hope that in its first version it will cover a significant number of use cases currently covered by the XPL implementation found in Orbeon PresentationServer.

XPL has been used by many OXF and OPS users over the last three years, and we believe that XPL may be the XML processing language (A/K/A XML pipeline language) that has in fact been used the most. We therefore call for users of XPL to submit their use cases: what are they, have they or do they plan to use XPL for. Feel free to submit such use cases to the ops-users mailing-list, or directly to the public XML Processing Model at public-xml-processing-model-wg at w3.org.

We are excited to announce that Orbeon will be giving a technical session at ObjectWebCon 06 on January 31, 2006. The tentative abstract goes as follows:

Your Presentation Layer with XForms

With the advent of service-oriented architectures, choosing a presentation technology for web applications remains a critical decision. We show the benefits of using the XForms 1.0 standard as the core technology for the presentation layer of service-based web applications.

XForms is a W3C recommendation since late 2003 and implementations have since then matured. XForms benefits include platform agnosticism, a highly declarative approach to describing user interfaces, XML Schema-based validation, and friendliness to XML services.

After an introduction to the XForms technology, we focus on the implementation of XForms 1.0 provided by Orbeon PresentationServer 3.0, an ObjectWeb project, which leverages Ajax technologies to bring responsive user interfaces to all modern web browsers without the need for plugins. We then show how it is possible to quickly develop a web application that leverages existing services, directly or through an enterprise service bus.
The presentation will feature live demonstrations.

We promise that the presentation will be very demo-oriented and will get you excited about the XForms technology and its Orbeon PresentationServer implementation!

Details about the sessions can be found on the conference’s web site.

The following changes have been implemented since OPS 3.0 BETA 3:

• Numerous XForms engine bug-fixes and improvements.
• Documentation improvements.
• Improved and reorganized examples.
• XForms engine initialization performance improvements.

You can download it from the usual place:

http://forge.objectweb.org/project/showfiles.php?group_id=168

The examples and documentation have been updated online:

http://www.orbeon.com/ops/

With this beta we are getting closer from OPS 3.0 final, which hopefully is not too far away!