Xforms - An insight

Xpath, Xquery, Xlink, XSLT, Xforms uph... the never ending list of techologies that begin with an X and literaly give people headaches being one of the most complicated yet powerful SGML. This is a honest effort to render off itsy bitsy details about one such XML based technology - Xforms.

Well Xforms to begin with is a W3C recommendation that is a replacement for standard HTML forms. XForms provides a richer, more secure, and device independent way of handling web input. Pretty easy to learn actuall if u go through some tutorials like http://www.w3schools.com/xforms/xforms_intro.asp but they don't spell out the looming truth. You can very well write an xform page but to get it to display in your ordinary browser... well its close to defining hell. So here's what you got to do.

XForms browser Plugins

For Mozilla: Well for all those who switched to mozilla 3.0 there's no plugin available for Xforms, there goes W3c statements of supporting Xforms in all future browsers. The new kid on the block Chrome also doesn't support it natively nor has it plugins. For those still on Mozilla 2.0 check http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xforms/download.html

For IE: for once IE is good. Well atleast there are plugin developers who have developed plugins for Xforms for non native support. These include formsplayer and Novell

XForms standalone browsers

The most popular standalone XForms browser is surely X-Smiles, developed by the the University of Helsinky. X-Smiles is a Java-based browser, with full support for XForms and for Smil. X-Smiles works as well on PCs, as on PDAs as on (modern) mobile phones

XForms application servers

This is the third category which is quite useful if you don't want your clients to install software at their end to run your web application. That doesn't make it the recommended option though as its damn slow as the server process your xml based form and renders an equivalent html+js. However you can try it out in case you can sacrifice the speed for delivering your end users a hassle free usage of your application. The most popular of these application servers is probably Chiba 2.0, from ChibaCon. It is open source, very stable, and very easy to install on the server: just deploy the .war file on your favorite application server (Tomcat, JBoss, Orion, Resin, Oracle, WebLogic, WebSphere ...), and you are ready.