XForms Everywhere

After years of work, XQuery 1.0, XSLT 2, XPath 2 and a few related specifications are now W3C Recommendations! This is excellent news as these specifications had been “almost there” for years now. From the W3C site:

The World Wide Web Consortium has published eight new standards in the XML family for data mining, document transformation, and enterprise computing from Web services to databases. “Over 1,000 comments from developers helped ensure a resilient and implementable set of database technologies,” said Jim Melton (Oracle). XSLT transforms documents into different markup or formats. XML Query can perform searches, queries and joins over collections of documents. Using XPath expressions, XSLT 2 and XQuery can operate on XML documents, XML databases, relational databases, search engines and object repositories.

Check the details at W3C.

Orbeon Forms has supported all these technologies for a long time thanks to the use of Mike Kay’s Saxon XSLT and XQuery Processor and thanks to the eXist XML database, which of course supports XQuery.

Both these fantastic tools have been closely following the evolution of the specifications at W3C, which means that with Orbeon Forms, you don’t have to wait: you can today already use XSLT 2.0 to transform documents and create XForms page templates, XQuery 1.0 to query XML databases, and XPath 2.0 expressions within XForms pages and XML pipelines.

Thanks to all the W3C working group members who have made this possible!

After lots of promises over the past few months, the new Orbeon Forms tutorial is finally available! You can read it online or get it with any recent builds of Orbeon Forms.

The tutorial specifically targets the upcoming Orbeon Forms 3.5, of which you can find nightly builds here. The tutorial covers:

• Installing and configuring Orbeon Forms.

• Understanding the simple XForms Hello application.

• Building from scratch the Bookcast application, which allows you to keep track of the books you have read. The Bookcast application introduces many concepts of XForms, handles persistence, and, as icing on the cake, even generates an Atom feed!

This is the first public version of the tutorial, and if you have any questions, issues or suggestions, please send a message to the ops-users mailing-list. It is easy to subscribe by following these instructions.

This is a quick reminder that we will be present at Solutions Linux / Solutions Open Source in Paris on Thursday, February 1! We will give a talk in the conference track called “Web 2.0, towards web oriented applications ?“, under the title “Managing web forms interactively with XForms”. Here is the abstract of the talk:

When talking about Web 2.0 technologies such as Ajax, not many think about XForms. However XForms, a W3C recommendation since 2003, is gathering momentum as the same technology that enables Google Maps also allows deploying complex but user-friendly enterprise forms to the majority of deployed web browsers (including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera) without the need for plugins or other client installation.

In this presentation, we introduce XForms technology, explain the basics of Ajax-based XForms, and show how you can use open-source software to implement end-to-end forms solutions based on standards such as XForms and XML, while using cutting-edge technology like Ajax to make your forms user-friendly and easy to deploy.

The presentation will conclude with a series of demonstrations based on open source software.

In other words, we’ll show how easy it is to build form-based apps with Orbeon Forms! See you there!

The Orbeon Forms selection controls just got better!

Dropdown menus and single selection lists (xforms:select1 with minimal and compact appearances) now support a two-level hierarchy (the two-level limitation comes from HTML). Consider the Orbeon Forms list of sample applications:

<applications>
    <section label="Welcome">
        <application id="welcome" label="Welcome"/>
    </section>
    <section label="XForms">
        <application id="forms" label="Government Forms"/>
        <application id="xforms-controls" label="XForms Controls"/>
        <application id="xforms-sandbox" label="XForms Sandbox"/>
        <application id="xforms-todo" label="To-Do Lists"/>
        <application id="xforms-translate" label="Instant Translation"/>
    </section>
    ...
</applications>

The Orbeon Forms Source Code Viewer builds a hierarchical menu (see picture) with just a few lines:

<xforms:select1 appearance="minimal">
    <xforms:label>Application:</xforms:label>
    <xforms:itemset nodeset="instance('apps-list-instance')//(section|application)">
        <xforms:label ref="@label"/>
        <xforms:value ref="@id"/>
    </xforms:itemset>
</xforms:select1>

The magic is that the xforms:select1 control simply picks up the hierarchy of the item-set.

In addition, selection controls are no longer limited to just an item-set or a list of items: you can now mix and match items, item-sets and choices, for example:

<xforms:select1 appearance="minimal">
    <xforms:label>Select: </xforms:label>
    <xforms:choices>
        <xforms:label>Flavors</xforms:label>
        <xforms:item>
            <xforms:label>Pistachio</xforms:label>
            <xforms:value>p</xforms:value>
        </xforms:item>
        <xforms:itemset nodeset="instance('flavors-instance')/flavor">
            <xforms:label ref="label"/>
            <xforms:value ref="@value"/>
        </xforms:itemset>
    </xforms:choices>
    <xforms:choices>
        <xforms:label>Carriers</xforms:label>
        <xforms:item>
            <xforms:label>USPS</xforms:label>
            <xforms:value>usps</xforms:value>
        </xforms:item>
        <xforms:itemset nodeset="instance('carriers-instance')/carrier">
            <xforms:label ref="label"/>
            <xforms:value ref="@value"/>
        </xforms:itemset>
    </xforms:choices>
</xforms:select1>

These feature are available in the latest Orbeon Forms nightly builds. Enjoy!

The Orbeon team wishes you a Happy New Year!

We accomplished quite a bit in 2006:

• We released Orbeon Forms (previously Orbeon PresentationServer) 3.0 in January. This release featured the first stable version of our brand new XForms engine based on Ajax, and the culmination of an effort that we had started in early 2005.

• Since the 3.0 release, we have been hard at work fixing bugs, improving performance, and implementing new features, many of them sponsored by customers.

• We helped our customers go through deployments of Orbeon Forms 3.0 and later. We thank them, as they have helped make Orbeon Forms increasingly solid!

• We released a first milestone of Orbeon Forms 3.5 in late August.

• We made it clearer that the platform is about web forms. In particular, we renamed it Orbeon Forms and we improved the web site’s message.

So what’s coming up for Orbeon Forms in 2007? That’s pretty simple: our priority is to release Orbeon Forms 3.5. You can get an idea of the changes between 3.0 and 3.5 in our preliminary change log. We are still working on a few bugs and on finishing up our new tutorial and then we can go gold! Keep reading this blog to find out what will happen after that ;-)

Happy New Year again!