December 12, 2002
Check this page's home for updates: http://www.pagesmiths.com/webforms/
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To receive announcements on progress for this project, and especially if you would like to help implement it, send me email (mailto:jim@pagesmiths.com).
Develop and host a web application that enables "end users" to create their own forms-oriented applications on-line.
The base line reference model for this application is FileMaker (http://www.filemaker.com/) as it supports the kind of simple direct action and immediate functions for schema design, form layout, browse/edit/search modes, and report generation that is desired for this application.
The key enabling concept (besides the commitment to enabling end users rather than simply building yet-another-tool-for-programmers) is the implementation of an interactive form editor for XML documents defined with XML Schema. Since XML Schema documents are themselves XML, the same editing toolset is used to implement that function.
The application schemas will be represented with XML Schema.
Form layouts will be represented with W3C
XForms.
Display formatting will use XHTML with CSS.
The initial default for persistence will be Apache Xindice
(XML file database).
The application environment will be Apache
Cocoon.
Printed report formatting will use Apache
FOP with transformed from XHTML + CSS.
Internal processing is primarily with XSLT,
although XQuery
is used where advantageous.
Some more information is in the outline for my web forms application which serves as something of a prototype for this system.
The slide presentation on my experience with XML Forms which I used for the talks at the OCJUG and LAJUG is here:
http://www.pagesmiths.com/webforms/webforms-slides.html
An archive with the source for the sample project can be found here:
http://www.pagesmiths.com/webforms/archives/
All of this material is Copyright 2001-2002 by James P. White.
The sample project may be reused and redistributed under the terms of the Apache Software License:
Chiba is an Open Source Implementation of the W3C XForms.
Report manager is a reporting
application (Report Manager Designer) and also a set of components for Delphi , Builder and Kylix.
Xineo XIL
(XML Import Language) defines an XML language for transforming various
record-based data sources into XML documents, and provides a fully functional
XIL processing implementation.