The Orbeon Forms Blog

This is the Orbeon Forms blog. Stay up to date with the latest releases and new features of Orbeon Forms!

More security improvements

Photo by buschap Following up on changes making the upload control safer, we recently committed improvements to cryptography-related features within Orbeon Forms. Orbeon Forms doesn’t rely very much on encryption in the first place. That’s because a lot of information is created and stays on the server, without ever making it... More

Orbeon Forms 4.0 M9

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.0 M9 (Milestone 9). Like 4.0 M8 and the previous milestones this is not a final release. We have addressed the following issues in this build: Form Runner Not found error with noscript error summary (#405) Summary page: form title/description no longer shown (#408) Error summary uses improved "visited"... More

Choosing web technologies

Photo by ladyvee9 Back when we started Orbeon we didn’t have to think too much about which technology to choose given our background: Java was cool then, it was king on the server, and we had worked with it before it even reached version 1.0. But that was maybe the last time we didn’t... More

Keeping Form Builder light

In Orbeon Forms 3.9, Form Builder had for each control label: A read-only version of the label, shown most of the time. An HTML input, shown when editing the label. Both hold the same value, and only one is shown at a given point in time. But do we really... More

Orbeon Forms 4.0 M8

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.0 M8 (Milestone 8). Like 4.0 M7 and the previous milestones this is not a final release. We have addressed the following issues in this build: Form Runner Send email: support TLS and custom port (#395) New L&F: editor for title and description in Form Settings (#376) fr:number doesn't... More

Designing a great phone number field

For a long time now we’ve had a US phone number field in Orbeon Forms which looks like this: While fixing a validation highlighting issue for 4.0, we spent some time cleaning-up that control, and along the way thought about how to improve it. We thought about the following: Should... More

Orbeon Forms 4.0 M7

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.0 M7 (Milestone 7). Like 4.0 M6 and the previous milestones this is not a final release. We have addressed quite a number of issues in this build, in particular: Form Builder Delete grid row with confirmation doesn't work anymore (#362) Static image doesn't support hint so label is... More

A finite state machine to the rescue

On this blog, we often mention new features we recently implemented in Orbeon Forms, but rarely discuss how they have been implemented. Today, let’s make an exception, and come back to a feature discussed a couple of weeks ago: Form Builder’s new UI to edit labels and hints. UI programming... More

Orbeon Forms 4.0 M6

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.0 M6 (Milestone 6). Like 4.0 M5 and the previous milestones this is not a final release. We have addressed quite a number of issues in this build, in particular: Form Builder FB: Dirty/validation don't work anymore (#114) FB: Form dirty just after publish (#116) Expand cell over existing... More

Keeping code alive

There is a great bit by Joel Spolsky dating back to year 2000: Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they've been fixed. There's nothing wrong with it. It doesn't acquire bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive. Joel... More