erik-bruchez

A round of XForms engine performance improvements

Now that Orbeon Forms 3.7 beta 1 is out, we have committed a series of changes that intend to improve the performance of the XForms engine. These particular changes initially focused on <xforms:insert> and <xforms:delete>, but they ended up requesting a fairly major refactoring of the XForms controls code on the server. Some (probably obscure) [...]

Orbeon Forms 3.7 beta 1 is available

We have just made Orbeon Forms 3.7 beta 1 available for download. This release contains about 200 issues addressed since Orbeon Forms 3.6.

There are still a few blockers to address before we can release 3.7 final. Here are useful links to see what’s left to do:

Issues by highest priority

Recently open issues

Recently closed issues

Enjoy!

What we have been up to

In the last few months, we have been regularly posting updates to Twitter so we have had less of a need to write full blog entries. But now we feel that owe the followers of this blog a higher-level update:

Form Builder and Form Runner. A big priority is our continued work on Form Builder and [...]

Announcing Orbeon Form Builder

It is with great pleasure that we are announcing Orbeon Form Builder. Form Builder allows you to build forms right from your browser and aims at taking the pain out of building forms. It is 100% open source, standards-based, and built on top of the Orbeon Forms XForms implementation, which we have been refining for [...]

See You Next Year, JavaOne!

That’s it, JavaOne 2008 is over! We were on the OW2 booth for three days last week, busy demoing the latest in Orbeon Forms.

We got a few good contacts during the conference, which also provided us with the opportunity of knowing the rest of OW2 guys better. Go check out the web site, you will [...]

Orbeon on Twitter

Orbeon is now on Twitter, under the username orbeon. We have started providing regular updates about Orbeon Forms there.

If you don’t know what Twitter is, or if you are thinking “Why would I join another social network?”, think again: Twitter is different. Maybe this blog entry by Mark McGuinness will help you understand what it’s [...]

Image display and upload with XForms 1.1

With XForms 1.0, xforms:output was limited to displaying plain text. With the introduction of XForms 1.1, xforms:output adds powerful capabilities which include handling images, HTML content and more, depending on your XForms implementation.

To achieve this, XForms 1.1 introduces a new mediatype attribute. You use it to specify the type of the content to display, using [...]

Orbeon at JavaOne 2008

We are glad to announce that we will be present at JavaOne 2008 on the OW2 Consortium stand. This year, JavaOne will take place May 6-9.

We have some great Orbeon Forms demos in the works so be sure to stop by!

A load of Orbeon Forms enhancements

Wow, it’s been a month since our last post in this blog, and one of the reasons for this is that we have been very busy enhancing Orbeon Forms! Here is a quick list of the most notable additions:

XPath variables. XPath variables can be used within controls, models and actions, with the xxforms:variable (or exforms:variable) [...]

More powerful XForms actions thanks to iterations

XForms 1.1’s small number of actions are surprisingly powerful. By combining them, you can do almost any operation you can think of within an XForms page. Yeah, XForms is Turing complete.

There are however a few use cases that remain difficult to achieve. For example, you can easily repeat an action while a condition is satisfied [...]

Keeping your session alive

A couple of weeks ago I attempted to order prints from Flickr. I added a few photos to my cart and was redirected to a service called QOOP. This has a neat interface that allows you organize photos for printing in a book format. I played a bit with the interface and then was caught [...]

Bad forms, part II

I recently booked a flight on the Continental web site. I knew approximately the flight I wanted to book, so dug right away into the search to select it. I encountered the following issues:

When the results came, the prices were in Swiss francs. Since I was in Switzerland but using a US credit card, I [...]

Yahoo! goes XForms

Yahoo! today announced a new mobile platform called “Mobile Widgets”. The amazing part is that the language used to describe widgets, called Blueprint, is based on XForms:

Much of Blueprint’s philosophy and syntax comes from XForms. We opted for a full declarative language because it was the only way we could effectively run on the wide [...]

Orbeon Forms 3.6 Final Released

It is with great pleasure that we are announcing the final release of Orbeon Forms 3.6!

Orbeon Forms is an open source forms solution that handles the complexity of forms typical of the enterprise or government. It is delivered to standard web browsers thanks to XForms and Ajax technology, with no need for client-side software or [...]

Great success of the XForms Evening at the XML 2007 conference

We had great success with the XForms Evening a the XML 2007 conference on Monday. We were wondering if people would really want to attend sessions that late in the evening (from 7:30 to 9:00 PM), but the attendance beat our expectations, with easily over 60 people cramped in the allocated room and some actually [...]

Reminder: XForms Evening in Boston this Monday

As a reminder, there will be a free XForms Evening this Monday at the XML 2007 conference in Boston, and I will be presenting a talk about XForms and eXist. There are several great speakers scheduled and this is a great opportunity to learn about XForms, so don’t miss it! I hope to see you [...]

Bad form

Yesterday, I was filling-out an application form on the E*TRADE web site.

So here I go, entering my information in a traditional wizard-like workflow, with page reloads et al. When I get to the end of it (about six or seven pages total), I figure I would check if I could amend my mailing address on [...]

Orbeon Forms 3.6.0 RC1

We have just posted a release candidate for Orbeon Forms 3.6. Orbeon Forms 3.6 now contains over 170 improvements over Orbeon Forms 3.5.1.

The idea behind the release candidate is to see if anything is obviously broken before we release 3.6 final. It does not mean that Orbeon Forms is bug-free, mind you there are lots [...]

Firefox doesn’t get events right, especially on the Mac

When a form field is loosing the focus, the browser is supposed to send two events: blur and change. The latter is only sent if the you have changed the value of the field. When you change the value of a first field and tab to a second field, all the browsers get the events [...]

Getting closer to Orbeon Forms 3.6

Over the last two weeks, we fixed a series of bugs that we considered blockers for Orbeon Forms 3.6:

Error when using browser back button when using xforms:instance[@src = ‘input:*’]

Label is not hidden when repeat iteration is added

Inspector does not show initial XML (in some cases)

Issue with adjacent itemsets

Google Suggests example doesn’t work anymore

XPL, XQuery, XSLT, [...]