XForms Everywhere

Thursday and Friday were the last days at XTech 2006. I have to admit that I missed most of the Thursday morning talks in order to rehearse my own, so I don’t have much to report except Mark’s Building Rich, Encapsulated Widgets Using XBL, XForms and SVG which I mentioned earlier. In the afternoon I attended Ryan King’s The Intelligent Design of Microformats, Mark Birbek’s RDFA: The Easy Way to Publish Your Metadata, and Dean Jackson’s Standardising Web Applications: Rich Web Clients at W3C.

Then came my talk, XForms: an alternative to Ajax?, which I think had good success, with a decent number of questions and comments, as well as a few offline discussions afterwards. The talk / paper has been qualified online eye-opening and readable and very good (let us know if you find other references, positive or negative).

On Friday, I attended the talks on mobile web, including Opera’s Michael Smith’s Bringing Web 2.0 to Mobile Devices, Opera’s Håkon Lie’s Mobile Web Applications, and Nokia’s Andrei Popescu’s Mini Map - A web page visualization method for mobile phones. The idea of using standard web technologies to deliver applicatons to mobile devices is clearly an attractive one, and it is worth looking at W3C’s Mobile Initiative and Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 documents for inspiration.

I then went to see Amazon’s Jeff Barr’s talk on Amazon Web Services, which turned out to be a mistake since there was about 100% repeat with his closing keynote on the Amazon Mechanical Turk. The Amazon Mechanical Turk is clearly an amazing idea, but I knew about it already and did not learn that much during the closing keynote. I believe the potential of this service has yet to be unleashed and I think we are going to see some quite amazing uses of it in the coming years.

XTech closed with Brendan Eich’s JavaScript 2 and the Future of the Web. Brendan did a great job describing the new features of JavaScript 2 as well as addressing common criticism towards that evolution. The reasoning goes as follows: the future of the web is going to be XBL and JavaScript, so we better make JavaScript darn good. The idea that XBL and JavaScript will allow implementing XForms and newer markup languages without upgrading browsers is very appealing, although it assumes that browsers will implement XBL and XBL 2: currently the only browser working on this is Firefox, and as always, Internet Explorer may be the thorn in the side of these brilliants efforts. Whatever the outcome, XBL appears to be an excellent solution to extend XForms, on the client or on the server.

All in all, this year’s XTech conference was good, with such emerging themes as Ajax, declarative markup, XBL, and services, all topics relating directly to XForms and Web 2.0. The discussions around the mobile web were interesting as well. The conference was not perfect, in particular I wish the audience had been more varied. The next edition will be in Paris, and I am already looking forward to it!

The proceedings for the XTech conference are now online on the XTech web site. Here is the link to our paper: XForms: an Alternative to Ajax?

Many of the talks I have attended do not have papers online yet, but following-up on the subject of the use of XBL with XForms I talked about earlier, here is a link to an XForms-related talk which I was unfortunately unable to attend: Building Rich, Encapsulated Widgets Using XBL, XForms and SVG.

Yesterday was the second day at XTech 2006, and the first conference day. We had a very entertaining albeit a bit provoking keynote by Paul Graham about what it would take to reproduce Silicon Valley somewhere else.

I attended talks about real-life Ruby on Rails (BBC), XBL 2 (Mozilla), and Jabber. I also chaired two sessions, one about the Google Data API, and one about algorithms to implement numerical constraints in XML Schema, a very technical talk but quite well presented by Henry Thompson.

XBL 2 appears to be a perfect technology to use with XForms, and people like Mark Birbeck in fact have already implemented XBL in conjunction with XForms. The promise: using XBL as way of implementing new XForms components, whether written in markup and Javascript, or whether written with XForms themselves. In OPS, we could implement XLB 2 server-side and use it to provide an easy way to both encapsulate existing Ajax widgets as well as allowing users to define their own compound XForms components.

The Google Data API talk mainly revolved around Google Calendar. The cool thing is that this API is based on the Atom format, and supports updates. The demos showed how you can use C# to access that API. I almost fell off my chair while thinking that this should be much easier with XForms, as you can access XML services directly! For now, this is a new opportunity for a cool mashup demo.

The day ended with lots of discussions about XForms with the subset of the XForms working group present at the conference, and sightseeing from the roof of our working group chair’s house.

Yesterday was my first day at XTech 2006 in Amsterdam - the pre-conference day, with tutorials and a special “Ajax Day” track. I was unable to attend all the sessions and one presenter did not show up, but I did attend the talks on Dojo, OpenLaszlo, Flex, and Backbase.

Most interesting was the presentation of the Yahoo! User Interface library (of which we currently use the slider component to implement xforms:range). It appears that there is much more from it we could use in Orbeon PresentationServer, from basic facilities to event handling (even as the page loads), to animations to other widgets like the tree widget, and drag & drop.

The day ended with a series of 8 or 9 lightning Ajax demos, where we showed the OPS Ajax-based XForms engine - it was quite a challenge to do this in 5 minutes, but I got my last screen showing up as the clock marked 0:00!

Now for the philosophical part. As interesting all the presented technologies and frameworks are, most of them expose Javascript fairly heavily to the page author. This is true for the lower-level Dojo and YUI, of course, which doesn’t bother me the least as I see those frameworks as the “deployment” technology for XForms. But this is also the case for the higher-level OpenLaszlo and Flex - at least, they assume that you need Javascript to do something really useful, meaning by that a user interface that actually reacts to user interaction.

Now Javascript does come in handy at some point. However, with XForms, that point seems to be that much further removed, and this is simply due to XForms Events and actions and the underlying XML Events framework: a lot of thought has gone in those to define a small set of useful events and actions that greatly reduces the need for Javascript. While XForms is not quite unique in that respect (as I discovered with the Backbase presentation), it has that edge over most competing technologies. Now, add to that the fact that XForms is a standard, and of course you get a real winner.

XTech 2006 is going on right now in Amsterdam. As mentioned earlier, Erik will be giving a presentation on Thursday at 4:45pm entitled XForms: an alternative to Ajax?

This has been an amazing year for Ajax, and XForms has picked quite a bit of steam during this year too. On one hand, Ajax offers greatly improved UI capabilities compared to vanilla HTML and it makes a great deployment platform. On the other hand, XForms provides semantics, simplicity, and robustness. With XForms deployed on top of Ajax, we believe that those two technologies make a very complementary pair and provide a powerful, simple, and robust solution for forms and more.

We’ll soon post here the slides to Erik’s presentation. In the meantime you can check the slides of Steven Pemberton’s presentation about XHTML2 & XForms.

We are glad to announce that we will be at XTech 2006 in Amsterdam (May 16-19), where we will talk about XForms and Ajax. Here is the abstract that was accepted:

XForms: an alternative to Ajax?

Last year, we introduced server-side XForms as the most promising way of making XForms a short-term reality on the web.

In this year’s presentation, we discuss how this promise has materialized with hybrid Ajax-based open source implementations, and we demonstrate the most exciting capabilities of XForms running on today’s deployed web browsers.

We not only show how XForms fulfils its initial promise of becoming the next generation web forms, but also how it serves as a general-purpose dynamic user interface technology.

Finally, we show how hybrid XForms implementations effectively offer an abstraction layer over Ajax technologies that greatly simplifies the implementation of common Ajax use-cases, therefore giving XForms a place of choice in the “Web 2.0″ ecosystem.

We are looking forward to a great conference, as well as meeting you there!

Update (March 14, 2006): The schedule is now online and you can find more details there about Erik’s presentation.

Eric van der Vlist has interviewed Edd Dumbil about the XTech 2006 conference (Edd even mentions Orbeon!). We talked about server-side XForms last year at XTech 2005 and we will try to be present at this excellent conference this year again!

It is time for a (quite late) review of XTech 2005 in Amsterdam! The good news is that I can now simply point to other reviews of the conference, in particular Micah Dubinko’s extensive coverage.

XTech was a wonderful opportunity to meet the XML crowd, from many of the big XML heads, to OPS users, to people just in search of what XML can do for them.

My main interests were XForms and XML pipelines, and from that respect the conference was quite fruitful. There was quite a lot of interest around XForms, including talks about the OpenOffice implementation, using XForms for validation purposes, integrating XForms and XSL-FO, and of course our own talk, Are Server-Side XForms Engines the Future of XForms?.

In the XML pipelines (A/K/A XML processing model) area I attended a product presentation of Henry Thompson’s MT Pipeline, as well as Jeni Tennison’s excellent introduction to XML pipelining technologies. Let’s hope her call for a standardization effort will be heard!

There was more, of course, including a pretty heated debate between XHTML 2.0 and the WHATWG “HTML 5″ efforts. My own inclination is that I like the very clean approach taken by XHTML 2.0 over the “big bag of stuff” approach of WHATWG.

As others have already noted, the overall quality of the sessions was excellent and it was at time difficult to choose between sessions. Edd Dumbill should be acknowledged for an excellent conference!

All XTech papers and slides are available here: http://idealliance.org/proceedings/xtech05/, including our XForms talk’s slides and paper.

Update: The IDEAlliance web site still doesn’t show the updated version of the paper as of October 2005, but here is a link to it on the Orbeon web site.

In just a few days I will be going to Amsterdam for the XTech 2005 conference. The topic: “XML, the Web and Beyond”. It looks that this should be fun and interesting, and it’s going to be difficult to choose between tracks at times!

I have a particular interest in this conference since Orbeon has been developing XML technology for years now, including the XML Pipeline Language (XPL) and an XForms implementation, both supported in Orbeon PresentationServer (OPS), our open source XML platform.

As a reminder Orbeon will not only be attending the conference: I will be doing two talks on Wednesday, May 25: one about server-side XForms technology (Are Server-Side Implementations the Future of XForms?), and a product presentation of OPS. They will both be fairly technical, but I hope to sweeten things up with some good demos!

I look forward to meeting you at XTech!

We will be speaking at the XTech conference in Amsterdam on May 26. Don’t miss us there!

The subject of our main talk is Are Server-Side Implementations the Future of XForms?. It will discuss server-side approaches for XForms. We will also do a product presentation about Orbeon PresentationServer (OPS) the same day. We hope to be able to demo some features of the next version of the OPS XForms engine.

The complete schedule of the conference is available.