Re: [Xsltforms-support] Is XForms a failure to learn from?

On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 7:23 PM, Paul Vanderveen <pvanderveen@terraxml.com>
wrote:

>  Interesting thread
>
>
>
> We have integrated XForms into our product, and I would never say that
> XForms is a failure.  I do, however, think that for largely non-technical
> reasons the world has decided to go in other directions.  The work Alain’s
> done with XSLTForms is phenomenal, but XML in general is being hit hard in
> favor of lighter weight protocols.
>

Except that they are generally not lighter weight but people are being
taken in by the myth.



> I think XSLT is safe in that there is no real competitor for transforming
> XML documents.  XQuery is questionable as a transformation technology
> (IMHO), but it is still the best way to query an XML database full of XML
> content.   But even large XML database proponents like MarkLogic are
> supporting JSON as well as XML these days.
>
>
>

Probably because they have smarter people working for them than the NOSql
vendors who pretend that XML doesn't exist.


>  At TerraXML we have recently decided to adopt AngularJS for our new
> front end work, and the more I learn about it the more I see just how many
> similarities it has with XForms.   The model may be JSON instead of XML,
> but it is uncanny how it almost has a feature to feature match with
> XForms.  Even some of the struggles we’ve had with XForms also come across
> when building an AngularJS forms (I call it trial and error
> programming).    XForms was on the right track, it just didn’t get critical
> mass.   It needed somebody like Google to jump behind it and that didn’t
> happen.  They jumped behind AngularJS instead.   I don’t know what the
> future is for XForms, but our current plan is to support both XForms and
> HTML5/AngularJS for a time, but we will start migrate over to doing new
> forms using AngularJS.
>
>
>

The mass have repeatedly proved their ability to congregate around and prop
up bad ideas. JSON in a form... that somebody made it work doesn't mean
that it's a good idea.