Re: Leaving the Working Group

Keith,

You've made a great contribution to the working group, and I wish you
well with your new projects.

I'm hoping we'll still see you over in the Ubiquity XForms project, though. :)

All the best,

Mark

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 7:18 PM, Keith Wells <wellsk@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> Dear Working Group members,
>
> I mentioned several weeks ago in our teleconference that I may be
> transitioning away from XForms and moving to new assignments in my
> department at IBM. Well it has happened and I have to refocus my energies to
> new areas starting this week. Sadly, I will not be focused on XForms as a
> standard any more, but I will always continue advocating XForms as a
> superior tool for rapidly authoring robust web apps and easily presenting
> our client's and customer's data in their web browsers. Data presented
> anywhere, anytime!
>
> In my opinion, XForms has not received the accolades it deserves!
> Simplification, presentation, reuse of other standards, MVC,
> ease-of-authoring, abstraction; the people in the Forms Working Group have
> done an excellent job in designing XForms 1.0/1.1 and are years ahead in
> thought-share for opening complex web development from several thousand
> JavaScript and HTML developers to, well, several hundred-thousand (or more)
> authors, or to anyone who can learn declarative markup (assuming this task
> is easier than learning Java/JavaScript). To me, this is a revolutionary
> concept and we have been seeing other efforts to create declarative markup
> for AJAX/JavaScript expand from work in the Forms WG, in fact, several of
> our fellow Forms Working Group members are leading this charge!
>
> A comment from a fellow IBMer on a conference call one day, he said "I JUST
> want it to work!". How many times have we heard this statement from a
> customer, and then several months later, we hear "I JUST want it to work,
> AND I want it to be inexpensive to build, AND I want it to be even cheaper
> to maintain". Well, compared to C++. Java, and even JavaScript applications,
> XForms applications meet ALL THREE criteria – and you don't need a
> programmer involved at all!
>
> As I say goodbye to my friends in the Forms Working Group, I applaud your
> efforts over the years, I thank you for your innovation and ingenuity you
> have transposed to words in the XForms 1.1 specification, and I implore you
> to continue in your efforts to abstract "programming constructs" to
> "declarative markup" to simplify the "art" of programming in the development
> of Rich Internet Applications.
>
> Thank you all for your friendship and patience with a less-so-abstract
> thinker! :) I hope to run into each of you in my future! It has been fun for
> me!
>
> P.S. I have had a lot of fun hanging-out with you spec-writers -- you are a
> very different breed from your average programmer! (I am not saying that is
> good or bad, but my goodness, you can discuss a single small concept for
> hours if not days (and sometimes WEEKS)! haha ).
>
> Thanks,
> Keith



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http://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck

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Received on Tuesday, 17 February 2009 19:44:52 UTC