The state of Orbeon Forms, Part 3

Here is a summary of the Orbeon Forms developments for March 2009:

1. Form Builder and Form Runner

• Form Runner L&F improvements. The Form Runner look and feel is improved! We got rid of the overwhelming orange color in favor of a more appealing blue theme, put nicer-looking buttons, and reworked the positioning of the logo, title and description areas. Let us know how you like it! Form Builder is next in line for UI improvements.

• Form Runner and Form Builder packaging. In order to facilitate Orbeon Forms updates as well as modularity, Form Runner and Form Builder are now packaged in separate JAR files in the distribution. For development, they are still under RESOURCES/apps/fr and RESOURCES/forms/orbeon/builder.

• More flexibility with sections. Form Runner now has a bit more flexibility with sections: you can disable open/close in Ajax mode, or just disable animations.

2. XForms engine improvements

• XBL support is maturing. We put in lots of XBL bug-fixes last month. We have also setup a consistent directory hierarchy for XBL components.

• Map component. Nightly builds now feature a new map component written in XBL.

• More AVTs on controls. xforms:textarea supports xxforms:cols and xxforms:rows attributes as AVTs. All controls support the style attribute as AVT.

3. XForms tips from our scratchpad

• Up/down buttons. Here is a simple XForms 1.1 howto: Up/Down buttons in a table with xforms:repeat, xforms:insert, and xforms:delete.

• Optional empty item. XForms 1.1 tip to optionally add a first empty item to a select1 based on some condition.

4. Testing

• JavaScript unit test driver. Our JavaScript unit testing framework is now able to run all the tests at once.

• Running server-side tests from IntelliJ. We added some developer documentation about running Orbeon Unit Tests from IntelliJ IDEA.

That's it for today. Enjoy!