The Orbeon Forms Blog

I am back at my desk after two weeks in Italy, dedicated in part to Alex's wedding followed by a little tour of Tuscany (Firenze, Pisa, Lucca, San Giminiano, Siena, Assisi). I actually only took seven days off work, but it feels like a bigger break than that, probably because... More

We released today a milestone build, Orbeon PresentationServer 3.5 Milestone 1 (OPS 3.5 M1 in short). We haven't had anything but nighly builds since OPS 3.0.1, so this was really long overdue! What's new in OPS 3.5 M1? The answer is: a lot, particularly in the realm of XForms! Check... More

On Sunday night, the authors of the upcoming Professional Web 2.0 Programming submitted the last updates to their chapters. Alex and myself are quite relieved to be done with a task that took our weekends and evenings! This book owes everything to Eric van der Vlist, who provided the vision,... More

</param> </param> </param> </embed> </param> Recently, I was booking a flight on an airline's web site, when the application asked for my departing country (Switzerland). As soon as I performed my selection, the page reloaded in German. Since my 10 years of studying German did not quite make me fluent,... More

Web 1.0 applications typically perform client-side validation (when they do it at all) with JavaScript libraries, often checking only minimal aspects of the form. Upon submitting the form, server-side validation is performed as well (you can never trust the client), and in case of error the filled-out form is returned... More

John Boyer (of IBM and co-chair of the W3C XForms Working Group, of which Orbeon is an active member) mentions on his blog two new publications from the XForms Working Group: A new collection of errata for XForms 1.0 Second Edition was published on July 12, with welcome precisions on:... More

As a web application developer (or just as a regular human being), you have probably wondered at some point: why do online PDF documents open in my HTML browser window? This situation goes back many years, probably since the first browser plugin APIs were devised. It probably just sounded like... More

The official blog for the Google Maps API announced yesterday the addition of a new feature to their Map badge: continuous zoom. You can test this out on maps.google.com. At this point, I think choppy zoom would be better name than continuous zoom, as effect as I experience it is... More

First a disclaimer: no I am not switching to Rails as a web platform any time soon (XForms is way too cool to build Ajax-based user interfaces), but I happen to be writing a bit about Ruby, Rails and XML in our upcoming Web 2.0 book. This post is a... More

XQuery has been designed and is used today as a language to query XML data sources, including XML databases. So you would expect that XQuery offers the same level of expressiveness for XML data that SQL offers for relational data. A quick glace at the language would make one think... More