RE: [XForms] XForms and InfoPath

At my company we are in winding down our 5.0 release which fully integrates XForms into or core workflow engine, replacing our proprietary forms implementation. We did take a look at MS’s Infopath and we liked two things about it 1) It was a nice design tool for forms and 2) it was part of the MS Office suite, which will of course help it to proliferate.  I do feel that success with InfoPath will drive the demand for XForms.  We do see an opportunity in using InfoPath as another means of rendering XForms defined within our product.  From what I saw, Infopath did seem to be overly complex.  Not from the form designer perspective, but from the programmatic aspect.  There did not seem to be any “language/vocabulary” for Infopath, instead it relied upon code generation (mainly XSLT). Generating XSLs, XSDs, XML (default data), and one meta-data file all within one zip file.  Also there did not seem to be any way of having a self contained form defined in one !
 file, since the XML instance data was always a separate file that referenced the ZIP file through a URL.

 

Shone Sadler

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: AndrewWatt2001@aol.com [mailto:AndrewWatt2001@aol.com] 
Sent: Sunday, April 13, 2003 3:40 PM
To: www-forms@w3.org; xforms@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [XForms] XForms and InfoPath

 

A follow up comment to my earlier question about XForms and InfoPath.

Quite unexpectedly, today I have ended up reading quite a bit of Microsoft's 
publicly available information on InfoPath.

Relevant URLs include:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/infopath/default.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/office/using/column18.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/infopath/guide.asp (Document download 
of ‾50 pages)

InfoPath is being sold as XML delivering dynamic forms front end for XML Web 
Services.

I still haven't seen InfoPath in the flesh but, at the present time, it seems 
to me that XForms and InfoPath are going to be going head to head in certain 
spaces.

I think the XML-enabled forms space is going to be a very, very interesting 
one over the next couple of years.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if both XForms and InfoPath "win" - in the 
sense that both technologies gain substantial market following.

Maybe, just maybe, InfoPath 2.0 will make use of XForms??? :)

Interesting times lie ahead. At least that is my $0.02. :)

Andrew Watt




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