Does XForms have a successor?

Question

We are looking for a desktop forms technology with an easy to use (read non technical) authoring environment. When I last looked at this, some years back, it seemed that XForms would mature in to something really useful. Now there appears to be little happening with the technology (only 5 questions under the XForms tag here for instance) and not much offered in the way of tools, especially desktop based ones.

So, is XForms dead? Has something better come along?

Answer 1

There's a lot of software which supports XForms. I used it for a project a couple years ago, and I was impressed by the amount of work done by very little code. The W3C does not advertise their technologies to PHBs, so adoption is bound to be slow while others are pushing buzzword-compliant vendor specific solutions as panacea. There's also stigma among developers (especially those who consider themselves "hard core", it seems) against what is seen as a pointless "XML-ization" of everything in computer science. Also, the side track into HTML 5 I believe is taking the focus away from the more interesting issues on the web.

Answer 2

It's probably blasphemy to call it successor, but forms are being worked on in HTML5 (it all started as "Web Forms 2.0").

It's not more advanced than XForms, but answers "what happened to XForms".

Answer 3

We are currently reviewing XForms for a project. There are several small, active projects previously mentioned, although Ubiquity has been merged into backplanejs, and that appears moribund.

Orbeon is certainly actively developing and releasing new versions, and slowly adding features from XForms 2.0 standard. From an external point of view, they appear to be the healthiest and are LGPL/commercial. They are not a pure client solution, though, as there is a server component.

BetterFORM is also actively developing and releasing new versions, and their solution is pure client-side for XForms.

There are a couple of small projects that look interesting: XSLTForms seems to be the liveliest and is 100% browser-based; there's a dual license LGPL/commercial.

In my opinion, it's a great technology but it's also a niche technology. The ability to "externalize" chunks of your user interface is extremely useful (especially in my company's application), but it doesn't result in UIs that are as good as the best HTML5 UIs.

I do not know whether client-only XForms support is the best approach in an age of apps and mobile devices. I do know that I'd like to see a product that produced UIs compatible with popular Javascript frameworks like extjs to simplify inclusion of XForms into an existing UI.

If you need it, it's out there, but it doesn't look like it will ever be big.