The Orbeon Forms Blog

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

Reminder - Orbeon at Solutions Linux / Solutions Open Source

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... More

Cooler Selection Controls

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"... More

Happy New Year

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... More

Configuring an Apache Front-End for Orbeon Forms

Orbeon Forms runs within a container such as Tomcat, which is able to serve HTTP requests directly to a web browser. Usually, serving content this way will be reasonably fast, and you benefit from having just one piece of software to install and configure. But Tomcat was not primarily designed... More

xforms:upload on steroids

If you have some experience with HTML and Ajax, you probably know that HTML upload is a funny beast. For example, if you submit an HTML form with JavaScript, you don't have control over the response and the result is an entirely new document. And you can't just submit an... More

Professional Web 2.0 Programming Now Available

Finally, Professional Web 2.0 Programming is now shipping from Amazon.com. I have also just received a big box with my personal copies of the book and it looks great! Read all about the book at Wrox. Also check out the excerpt, Future-Proofing Your URIs. More

XPath: The unordered() function, Quite an Oddity

There is a function in XPath which takes one parameter and that XPath engines are free to implement by just retuning that parameter. It is the unordered() function. How useful can it be? The unordered() function takes a sequence of items as parameter and return a sequence that contain the... More

XPath: Tuning your XPath Expressions

When you write an XPath expression, you say what information you want to extract from an XML document, but you don’t tell the XPath engine how to perform that task. Consider for instance the expression: /phonebook/person[starts-with(phone-number, '323') and last-name = 'Lee'] Imagine you are running this query on a hypothetical... More

Future-Proofing Your URIs

Wrox has put online an excerpt from our upcoming book Professional Web 2.0 Programming. Check out Future-Proofing Your URIs! More

XPath: The Many Faces of a Document

From time to time, you will come across a function in XPath that returns an XML document. If you are using XSLT 1.0 or 2.0, XPath 2.0, XQuery, or XForms, you will get to use a mix of instance(), doc(), and document(). Let's start with instance() which you'll find in... More