The Orbeon Forms Blog

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... More

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... More

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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