Report on the XForms Implementation Workshop, 27th/28th February 2003

The XForms Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) held an
XForms Implementors Workshop on 27th and 28th February 2003 at Novell Inc.,
Waltham, near Boston, MA, USA. The aim of the meeting was to exchange
experiences with implementation, identify issues for advancing XForms 1.0
from Candidate Recommendation phase of the W3C process, and to demonstrate
implementations. In attendence were members of the Working Group, and a
number of representatives of other companies implementing and using XForms.

At the outset, the attendees identified at least 20 known implementations of
XForms that are in progress, as well as 2 'half' implementations (only
implementing the model), and a validator.

Some large user communities were mentioned, in particular the British
Government's e-government interoperability framework, which says "current
guidance is to use the XForms 1.0 standards as defined by W3C".
http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/documents/e-GIF4Pt2_2002-04-25.pdf (page 14).

Several systems were shown with demonstrations that included some novel use
for XForms. Systems included the publicly available XSmiles, Novell
Technology Preview, x-port.net FormsPlayer, as well as some unannounced
systems. Of note was an unannounced implementation from Oracle that
demonstrated the same form being served to a PC screen, a mobile phone
screen, a voice server over a speaker phone, and even via an instant
messenger virtual buddy.

There were discussions about and identification of issues not easy to
resolve within an implementation, and issues that needed clarifying in the
XForms specification, as well as discussions of features that although too
late to add now would make good candidates for a future version of XForms.

One major decision taken at the meeting was to move XForms Basic from the
XForms 1.0 specification to a separate one-page specification of the XForms
Basic profile. The Working Group took this decision to reduce delays for
XForms advancing to Proposed Recommendation status since we are already
close to having our required two XForms Full implementations. The XForms
Basic Profile, once separated out, will allow for XForms implementation on
Mobile devices.

The XForms Working Group were delighted and energized by the workshop; the
enthusiasm of the implementors and the interesting use cases that they had
produced has shown the value of the general approach defined by XForms, and
bodes well for its future adoption.

Steven Pemberton
Chair, W3C Forms Working Group

Received on Wednesday, 2 April 2003 04:46:49 UTC