A high-fidelity prototype provides the engineers and QA organization with a rich, interactive description of the product's intended functionality and
design to be used as a reference basis for implementation and test. Whenever this subject is raised my thoughts turn immediately to XForms. The advantage of prototyping with XForms is that it is quick, declarative, readable and is well defined.
XRX
XForms for Prototyping
Submitted by administrator on Mon, 12/01/2008 - 08:27.XForms for Prototyping
Submitted by administrator on Mon, 12/01/2008 - 08:27.A high-fidelity prototype provides the engineers and QA organization with a rich, interactive description of the product's intended functionality and
design to be used as a reference basis for implementation and test. Whenever this subject is raised my thoughts turn immediately to XForms. The advantage of prototyping with XForms is that it is quick, declarative, readable and is well defined.
The Future of XForms
Submitted by administrator on Thu, 10/02/2008 - 19:52.Some of the recent talk on the Mozilla XForms Project's mailing list (dev-tech-xforms) has been about the winding-down in effort on the Mozilla XForms plug-in. There has been praise for the efforts of those developers involved in the project, and quite rightly so. However, some people may be seeing this as a bad sign for XForms in general. Well, not so I say and the reasons for this are three-fold...
XRX: Simple, Elegant, Disruptive - O'Reilly XML Blog
Submitted by administrator on Fri, 08/01/2008 - 21:04.XRX: Simple, Elegant, Disruptive - O'Reilly XML Blog
XRX: XQueries in eXist | O'Reilly News
Submitted by administrator on Thu, 07/31/2008 - 16:00.1st part in a series of tutorials on XRX - building a RESTful delicious client in eXist and orbeon
XRX: Performing Updates | O'Reilly News
Submitted by administrator on Wed, 07/30/2008 - 15:15.XRX: Performing Updates | O'Reilly News
XRX
Submitted by administrator on Thu, 05/29/2008 - 22:09.Bumped into XRX today. XForms + REST + XQuery. I like the sound of this, and XForms on the client just got a whole bunch easier…
I’m seeing multiple signs that the confluence of XForms and XQuery has legs. (And REST just plain makes sense in any situation). -m
XRX: Simple, Elegant, Disruptive
Submitted by administrator on Tue, 05/27/2008 - 12:33.I recently started writing for O’Reilly Media. I posted an article on XRX.
Here is the link:
http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2008/05/xrx_a_simple_elegant_disruptiv_1.html
We are just getting started moving to a new MoveableType (MT) system so not all of the features (like keywords and feedback) are working.
If you have problems commenting on the site, please feel free to post your comments here.
Here is a comment from Arun Batchu:
An elegant introduction to an elegant architecture, Dan. Thank you. The essential takeaway from what you describe is the exploitation of XML from one end to the other end - especially from the Developer's perspective, for, how XRX actually manifests in runtime could be left to implementation technologies. Thus the logical architecture of XRX could be realized by a few variations of concrete technology - which is great. The XForms could be realized by XForms server technology (such as the excellent Orbeon stack), the ReST could be realized by any middle tier and the XQuery could be realized by an XQuery engine (such as Data Direct) that may actually be driving any one or a combination of datastores (XML, SQL, file system or ...) . The symmetrical and consistent leverage of XML as a data model from creation to transport to rest and back eliminates a whole lot of wasteful work. Like you point out, XPath is one of the most powerful query systems I have encountered; you can pack so much in so little and reuse it across the board with little if any change from the drawing board to production. In such a system as you describe, a business rule expressed once can be reused anywhere - from one end-to-end , however long the travel, as long as the architecture is XRX, like you have described. Thanks for expressing it so well. A few of your readers will not get it - it is one of those things that once you experience it, you are left wondering why this did not happen before. Oh, well!
You are welcome! Thank for your feedback Arun!
XForms Tutorial and Cookbook Voted Featured Wikibook!
Submitted by administrator on Sun, 03/09/2008 - 21:52.I am happy to announce that the XForms Tutorial and Cookbook that I have been working on for over a year been voted a "Featured Book" on the wikibooks web site. A quote from the award:
XForms is a featured book on Wikibooks because it contains substantial content, it is well-formatted, and the Wikibooks community has decided to feature it on the main page or in other places. Please continue to improve it and thanks for the great work so far!
Here are some stats on the book so far:
90 sample programs
116 chapters
626 edits
28,811 words
29 registered authors
One of the big tasks is to start to move some of the advanced XForms examples that require siginficant server-side logic to a seperate server-specific book. As a pilot I have started an XRX cookbook for people using REST interfaces and the eXist server.
I would like to thank the over 30 others that have contributed ideas and content to this wikibook. We still have lots of work to do to cleanup the example programs, make them more consistent and add additional examples for new XForms students. But I believe it is one of the best examples of collaborative training that I have worked on in the last few years.
And the Winner is: eXist-db.org My Award for the Most Innovative Product of 2007
Submitted by administrator on Tue, 12/18/2007 - 01:28.As the year starts to come to a close we often take some time to look back at the year and look at the innovations that we have seen that have changed our worldview. I can think of many things that have had a large impact on me: The FireFox XForms extension, discovering the beauty of a well-designed REST interface, the mule enterprise service bus, Yahoo pipes and microformats all come to mind.
But after careful consideration I have to hand my award out to the most innovative application of the year to me to the eXist database/web server. This application constantly amazes me with what I can do with it. If you have a Java JVM on your desktop it only take a few minutes to get it running. Hit the startup script and you have a web server running on localhost:8080. Open a WebDAV browser and drag-and-drop you files and folders and away you go. With eXist I can easily setup a full enterprise metadata registry on a laptop in under five minutes.
The power of eXist comes from its use of the XQuery engine. Any well-formed XML file that is added to the system gets instantly indexed and can instantly be searched. That means that 10ms after you hit the "Save" on your XForms you can see the data appear in XQuery reports.
But the "Secret Sauce" of eXist rests in it's use of a lightweight Jetty web server with a remarkably integrated REST and WebDAV interface. This means that every XML file…is a static web service. This means that every XQuery that returns XML…is a dynamic web service that you can parameterize. This means that you can be writing your first web services in fifteen minutes that can be grabbing data from a dozen different XML files and quickly serializing the results out the wire.
eXist technologies are going to start to have a big impact once XForms/REST and XQuery (XRX) web development matures. I predict this is going to happen in the next three years. An although IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and many others are supporting XQuery in a big way, they don't yet have the really smooth integration with next-generation XForms-driven clients. You still need teams of
I must admit it took me a little while to really understand how the simplicity of the interface really rocked my world. Just swap out the world "rest" in the URL and replace it with the word "webdav" and you go from a data browser to a file system that works with every copy/cut and paste operation of the file system.
It is also interesting to note that this product did not come out of a Bay Areas startup, it didn't come out of Google Labs, it didn't come from Microsoft or IBM. From what I can tell the initial version was pretty much written by a single guy in
Thanks Wolfgang! Your labor of love is growing up!
Introducing the XRX Architecture: XForms/REST/XQuery
Submitted by administrator on Fri, 12/14/2007 - 14:08.At the XML 2007 conference there were many people that seemed to have independently discovered that if you combine XForms/REST and XQuery you can create a software development environment that circumvents the need for middle tier objects and conversion to and from relational databases.
The conference also had a great deal of discussion of how XForms is a great architecture but as Elliot Rusty Harold pointed out, we need something to happen for XForms to replace things like
What XForms needs is a label around the collection of ideas that makes XForms really give you an order-of-magnitude improvement over other web development architectures. I would like to suggest that we get behind one "label" that brings many of use under one big tent. I would like to suggest we use "XRX".
XRX to me would stand for the ideas behind XForms/REST/XQuery web applications. But if people are using XHTML as a container for XForms you could use XHTML/REST/XQuery. Just spare use the "J" which is associated with a hard-to-use language for über geeks.
You could also use XRX for the format of the data in the client and on the server. In this case it would be XML on the client (in the XForms Model), and in a native XML database that supports a REST interface.
We can still build awesome tools and frameworks that make the XRX architecture really fly. IBM Workplace Forms Development tools, Orbeon Presentation Server, Kurt Cagle's new frameworks that use the eXist native XML database, and the hundreds of other XForms development tools all fit into the XRX strategy.
But if we make XRX into a "big tent" strategy we can also include XQuery on the server as part of the architecture. This would include people like Jason Hunter at MarkLogic. Jason is an experienced Java developer that has started to move away from Java on the server and toward XQuery because of its richness. And I could not agree more.
I have been reading the book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell and trying to apply the ideas in it to the adoption of XForms and XQuery. I think that the book has many example of how a careful packaging of the ideas behind a contagious meme can make ideas spread like widefire.
So when we hear the term "XRX" we want to have the following concepts come to mind:
- A web development architecture with a 10x productivity improvement over traditional JavaScript/OO/RDBMS methods
- A development architecture based on international standards that is designed to minimize the probability of vendor-lockin
- An architecture that gives a rich user experience without creating mountains of spaghetti procedural code on either the client or the server
- A system that leverages the REST architecture to take advantage of high-performance and simple interfaces using web standards
- Portability on both the client and the server using a variety of forms players and XQuery databases
- The option of avoiding costly shredding (and reconstitution) of complex XML documents into RDBMS tables
- A community of standards/tools and a "complete solution" ecosystem that can give you a proven ROI on your IT investment
I don't expect everyone to buy into the XRX meme ideas. Everyone has their own favorite tools/standards and acronyms. But everyone that was at the XML 2007 conference could feel the excitement in the room at the XML presentations. Now we need to give that excitement a name and see if it sticks. Hopefully a few years we will be able to walk into a bookstore and see a bunch of books with "XRX" on the cover.
What I now need is for people to start to test the XRX meme and see if it slicks. Let me know what works and what does work. Send me your 30-second elevator pitch. How big should the idea tent be? What do we have to do to get more people in our tent? What evidence (case studies), example programs and resource do we need to convince the world we have seen the light …and its so elegant and beauty to will keep us from ever going back to the stone age of web development.
