IBM Lotus Forms submission for XForms evening event at XML 2007

Seeing is Believing: Intuitive Visual XForms Design
===================================================

The proposed presentation will demonstrate the order of magnitude 
simplification that XForms can offer to the design/development of business 
applications.  Although the goal of any form is to collect the data that 
drives back-end transactions, the sophistication of the business processes 
that we would like to drive with forms has risen dramatically over the 
years.  For example, whereas 10 years ago a form may have asked half a 
dozen questions, it is not uncommon for today's forms to ask half a dozen 
pages of questions.

XForms allows data to be collected for any schema, and it provides a 
vehicle for expressing the dynamic user interactions needed for the data 
fill experience.  This presentation will start with a blank form and a 
data architect's XML schema for a sample application, and work from there 
to show:

1) Drag-and-drop of various data types corresponding to different types of 
UI controls, including dates, selection lists, groups of UI controls and 
even tables of repeated controls.

2) Wizard-based generation of dynamic behavioral aspects of forms, 
including data-driven hiding/showing of groups of controls, table add row 
and delete row controls, and intelligent table row calculations and column 
summations.

The emphasis will be on the fact that everything about XForms, including 
the event-based imperative scripts for add row and delete row buttons, is 
expressed with declarative markup patterns that can result in an intuitive 
and efficient design experience.  The business implications for the forms 
industry include faster application development and time to market, more 
competitive RFP responses, reduced cost of maintenance and support, and 
increased end-user satisfaction leading to higher customer return rate. 


John M. Boyer, Ph.D.
STSM: Lotus Forms Architect and Researcher
Chair, W3C Forms Working Group
Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
IBM Victoria Software Lab
E-Mail: boyerj@ca.ibm.com 

Blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/JohnBoyer