Is anyone using XForms in their web applications?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/80940
italiano
english
français
española
中国
日本の
العربية
Deutsch
한국어
Português
RussianQuestion
A few years ago we started playing around with XForms from the W3C for a web app which required hundreds of custom forms.
As they aren't currently supported natively by the major browsers, what parsers/tools are you using on your projects today?
I'm not really interested in plugins - this needs to be something server side that emulates XForms.
Solution
We use XForms for creating user interfaces for SOAP-based web services. Currently we settled with Chiba XForms engine (http://chiba.sourceforge.net/), but Orbeon (http://www.orbeon.com/) actually seems more mature. Both are server-side engines, which convert XForms into HTML on the fly. The validation is performed on server side with the help of AJAX. This puts quite high demands on the server, so I wouldn't bet on those engines when creating sites with heavy traffic. Alternatives are well documented on XForms Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XForms.
OTHER TIPS
It is also possible to convert XForms to XHTML+Javascript with just an XSLT transformation so it can be done on client-side without plug-in. Have a look at http://www.agencexml.com/xsltforms/. It's an opensource project : http://sourceforge.net/projects/xsltforms
As far as I've understood, XForms is a natural fit to the current flavour of REST-based architectures while addressing most of the major issues with complex form development in a pretty neat way.
It's sad that people have largely forgotten about it :(
That said, there are Javascript-based xforms engines like Ubiquity that would help in getting cross-browser xforms support. And the recent development of high-performance Javascript VM's would give such engines great performance as well.
I do not use them and as they are not supported by any major browsers I doubt that anybody else will use them very often either.
