Mozilla XForms Extension Preview Version 7 - October, 2006
I was very pleased this afternoon to notice that Preview Version 7 of IBM/Mozilla extension for Firefox was released this month.
Mozilla XForms Extension Preview Version 7 - October, 2006:
Release Notes for Preview Version 7 - October, 2006
If you use the Eclipse IDE or use web standards in your software and/or web designs, you might be very interested in this article IBM published at its developerWorks site several months ago - Apply Schematron constraints to XForms documents automatically:
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) developed the XForms standard for the presentation and collection of form data. As stated in the W3C Recommendation, XForms is intended to be "the next generation of forms for the Web." As the Recommendation itself declares, "By splitting traditional XHTML forms into three parts -- XForms model, instance data, and user interface -- it separates presentation from content, allows reuse, gives strong typing -- reducing the number of round-trips to the server, as well as offering device independence and a reduced need for scripting."
XForms documents feature a data model that contains one or more XML instance documents. The form manipulates the instance documents and provides for the submission of that XML to a back-end system. Since Schematron is itself XML, XForms can easily treat it as part of the data model for a form.
XForms achieved a significant milestone with the release of the second edition of the XForms 1.0 specification on 14 Mar 2006. The update to the XML Forms Generator containing Schematron support became available on alphaWorks shortly thereafter.
The Eclipse extension from IBM that is described in the article allows one to easily create XML-based forms using XForms that comply with the W3C (world wide web consortium) XForms standard, and harness the Schematron standard for attaching validation rules to it as well.
XForms is pretty real at this point.
It will get a whole lot more real when the XForms extension gets bundled into Firefox instead of available as a user-installable option.
In the meantime, any developer or user can get it and install it in a minute or two. In my opinion, for some of them - that is time well-spent.
posted by John Collins @ 4:40 PM
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