Leaving the Working Group

Dear Working Group members,

I mentioned several weeks ago in our teleconference that I may be
transitioning away from XForms and moving to new assignments in my
department at IBM.  Well it has happened and I have to refocus my energies
to new areas starting this week.   Sadly, I will not be focused on XForms
as a standard any more, but I will always continue advocating XForms as a
superior tool for rapidly authoring robust web apps and easily presenting
our client's and customer's data in their web browsers.  Data presented
anywhere, anytime!

In my opinion, XForms has not received the accolades it deserves!
Simplification, presentation, reuse of other standards, MVC,
ease-of-authoring, abstraction; the people in the Forms Working Group have
done an excellent job in designing XForms 1.0/1.1 and are years ahead in
thought-share for opening complex web development from several thousand
JavaScript and HTML developers  to, well,  several hundred-thousand (or
more) authors, or to anyone who can learn declarative markup (assuming this
task is easier than learning Java/JavaScript).  To me, this is a
revolutionary concept and we have been seeing other efforts to create
declarative markup for AJAX/JavaScript expand from work in the Forms WG, in
fact, several of our fellow Forms Working Group members are leading this
charge!

A comment from a fellow IBMer on a conference call one day, he said “I JUST
want it to work!”.   How many times have we heard this statement from a
customer, and then several months later, we hear “I JUST want it to work,
AND I want it to be inexpensive to build, AND I want it to be even cheaper
to maintain”.   Well, compared to C++. Java, and even JavaScript
applications, XForms applications meet ALL THREE criteria – and you don't
need a programmer involved at all!

As I say goodbye to my friends in the Forms Working Group, I applaud your
efforts over the years, I thank you for your innovation and ingenuity you
have transposed to words in the XForms 1.1 specification, and I implore you
to continue in your efforts to abstract "programming constructs" to
"declarative markup" to simplify the “art” of programming in the
development of Rich Internet Applications.

Thank you all for your friendship and patience with a less-so-abstract
thinker! :)  I hope to run into each of you in my future!  It has been fun
for me!

P.S. I have had a lot of fun hanging-out with you spec-writers -- you are a
very different breed from your average programmer!  (I am not saying that
is good or bad, but my goodness, you can discuss a single small concept for
hours if not days (and sometimes WEEKS)! haha ).

Thanks,
Keith