The Orbeon Forms Blog

I read a couple of days ago an article by Brian Goetz on IBM DeveloperWorks about screen-scraping with XQuery. The idea behind HTML screen-scraping consists in accessing an HTML page on the web, and extracting information out of it. The DeveloperWorks article proposes two ideas: Using JTidy to convert the... More

We are now serving the RSS feeds for this blog through FeedBurner. FeedBurner makes sure the feed is well formatted so it works optimally on your reader. The URLs for the new feeds are: Postings RSS Comments RSS You can continue to use the old URLs if you wish as... More

Just before this weekend, I launched a mini-project to create a new "Blog" sample application for Orbeon PresentationServer (OPS). The idea had been suggested independently by two users of OPS, and there was also my own inclination to write another cool example application for OPS that leverages XML. Where do... More

Reason 1: XML is the standard for exchanging data Increasingly data that a Web application needs is available in XML format. Increasingly business logic is not mixed with the presentation layer to form an application, but is made available to the presentation layer as a reusable service and web services... More

Developers have known for a long time that unit testing can make a difference in software. In particular, solid unit tests help increase its robustness and make it easier to refactor source code. Extreme Programming (XP) in particular considers testing a core piece of its lightweight methodology (but many developers... More

A 3-Tier Architecture (3TA) is traditionally used when building web applications. It makes a logical separation between the presentation layer, the business logic layer, and the database layer. For instance, on the Java platform, the presentation layer could be implemented with JSP and JSF, the business layer with session EJB,... More

The Mozilla project recently announced the first beta version of their XForms support for the Mozilla and Firefox browsers. As the W3C puts it, XForms is the next generation of web forms. It aims at replacing HTML forms within XHTML, as well as providing other languages such as SVG the... More

This Monday Orbeon gave a short talk on XML pipelines at ObjectWebCon05 in Lyon, France. The talk was done in the context of ObjectWeb's ESBi initiative. The goal of this initiative is, in ObjectWeb's own words, "to foster reuse of ObjectWeb middleware in the domain of Enterprise Application Integration, starting... More

The Java Business Integration (JBI) specification currently being worked on within the Java Community Process (JCP) extends the Java Platform with the concept of services (as in SOA). It defines in particular what services are and how they can interact with each other over diverse protocols (e.g. JMS, SOAP). For... More

"Composite applications" has become quite a buzzword. But what are those composite applications, exactly? The short answer is: applications built by composing existing applications and services. Now let me give you the long answer. We are talking here about applications accessed by end users, not backend faceless programs. In most... More