Re: AJAX vs. Xforms

Peter Nunn wrote:
> 
> One of the real world problems faced with AJAX, is maintainability.  The 
> inability to use HTML to create an adequate client side form is why AJAX 
> exists but we need to view it as a mature technology with a very high 
> development and maintenance cost (speaking from experience here :-).
And XForms can help to solve that. Once an AJAX 'bridge' to an XForms 
processor is established you can use AJAX simply by writing XForms 
markup. There would be no need any more for specialized AJAX programming 
cause the implementation of every single XForms control will provide the 
needed AJAX functionality plus that of common childs. New components can 
  possibly be added as new appearances.

> So XForms is the leading edge of web development and should be viewed 
> that way.  Most browser vendors have some form of plan to support XForms 
> and given time it will become ubiquitous, just the same way that early 
> browsers did not have javascript or even DHTML.
Not being so optimistic here. Even if most will do some day the absense 
of 1 or 2 major ones would XForms never give chance to take off.

Server-side ajaxed XForms may very well fill this gap.


> My point here is that AJAX and XForms are complementary not competing.  
> AJAX is mature and widespread, but XForms promises and can deliver on a 
> host of other benefits as well as still being able to use AJAX 
> technologies (not that I recommend that at all :-).
Absolutely agree. Server-side XForms processors profit a lot from using 
AJAX.  It seems ideal to improve the poor user experience 
(interactivity) from pure server-side implementations and deliver XForms 
processing that 'feels' like client-side.

Orbeon already has its first samples running which already give an 
impression of what can be done. Chiba will also come up at least with a 
demo later this month with an AJAX interface which covers the whole 
processor functionality and run on Mozilla, IE and Safari.
> 
> 
> 
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Received on Monday, 31 October 2005 21:10:21 UTC