The Orbeon Forms Blog

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

Often people ask us what XML editor we are using. When I say I use IntelliJ from JetBrain, the next question is inevitably "uh? I thought IntelliJ was a Java IDE". Yes, IntelliJ is primarily a Java IDE, but it also has excellent support for JavaScript, HTML, and XML. The... More

</param> </param> </param> </embed> </param> With XForms 1.0, it is not possible to differenciate between a submission error due to an invalid form (or with required-but-empty values) and a submission error due to, for example, a network issue, an HTTP 404 error response, etc. XForms 1.1 is adding many submission-related... More

Erik had an entry just a few days ago about Unicode, and we'll be now looking at two encodings: ISO-8859-1 and windows-1252. It is not that character encoding is the most exciting thing around, but it is one we need to get right. ISO-8859-1, also called Latin 1, is the... More

It looks like software developers in particular love to hate software, any software. Well, almost any: FireBug seems to be loved by everyone. FireBug is an extension to Firefox that among other things let you explore the DOM of a web page, monitor Ajax requests, evaluate JavaScript expressions, and see... More

I had heard the rumor already, but by checking the XInclude errata it turns out this was right: XInclude now officially allows implementations to provide an option to disable xml:base fixup, in other words not to produce or update xml:base attributes in the result. This was a long-awaited feature. Adding... More

If I asked you whether Java supports Unicode, you would likely say yes, and you would be right. But did you know that this is not the end of the story? Did you know for example that a Java char (or its wrapper class Character) does not actually represent a... More