Fw: XForms requirements

With Micah's permission I'm posting this to the list.

Quick summary:

My concern is that the requirements do not make clear whether the objective
is to do a better job of handling forms of the type that are currently done
on the web and marginally increase the complexity and power of the forms we
can use or if the objective is to let people build powerful and complex
forms with tight database integrations like the ones people build with
Oracle Developer, PowerBuilder, etc.

My concern is that the need is for the latter, but the requirements cater
more to the former.

I would really appreciate it if some of the people involved in the standard
could look at some of the more complex forms in the client/server versions
of Oracle Financials, Peoplesoft, or SAP and ask themselves if XForms can be
used to duplicate that functionality with a reasonable effort.

Thanks
Mike
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
Michael Friedman
mfriedma@alum.mit.edu
+852 9458 6060
www.Michael-Friedman.com

Maintainer of the B2B_HK mailing list for B2B in Hong Kong and Greater
China.  Send e-mail to b2b_hk-subscribe@egroups.com to subscribe.

Maintainer of www.eChinaB2B.Net - the directory of B2B companies in Greater
China

----- Original Message -----
From: "Micah Dubinko" <MDubinko@cardiff.com>
To: "'Michael Friedman'" <mfriedma@alum.mit.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2001 12:22 AM
Subject: RE: XForms requirements


> Thanks for your comments. If you haven't already, I highly recommend
> subscribing to www-forms; instructions in the "Status of This Document"
> section of any XForms document. In fact, your message below would be an
> excellent thing to send there.
>
> My personal opinion is that 3.6 "Data Value and Form Control Dependencies"
> and 3.7 "Expandable Form Control Groups (Arrays)" in the requirements
> document together could fulfill most of #1, at least all the hard parts.
:-)
>
> #2 should be possible, but will require writing some script to query the
> server.
>
> I'm having trouble figuring out #3--what kinds of problems are Web
> developers having with this?
>
> I suspect that #4 will be possible through the XForms event model.
>
> Thanks!
>
> .micah
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Friedman [mailto:mfriedma@alum.mit.edu]
> Sent: Monday, March 12, 2001 10:04 PM
> To: mdubinko@cardiff.com
> Subject: XForms requirements
>
>
> Re http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-forms-req:
>
> I read the requirements.
>
> Many of these are very powerful features and it's interesting to think
about
> them.
>
> However, I was concerned that many of the basic bits of functionality that
> are part of most existing client-server forms system seem to be missing.
> These are the things that make it really hard to develop complex data
> oriented applications like order processing on the web.
>
> Some key items:
> Multi-level parent child relationships... An Order contains Order Lines.
An
> Order Line contains a Size and Color matrix (ie. quantities for different
> SKUs within the same item).
> Ability to iteratively pull information from the server without requerying
> the surounding page... for example, to bring back the first ten rows of a
> query and then pull back additional rows every time the user navigates to
> the bottom row.
> Some kind of relationship between query, modification, and insert forms
for
> the same data so that the development work does not need to be repeated
> Change tracking for fields and rows... this is important for database
> applications which may need to lock rows based on user changes and which
> only want to change rows that really changed.  In fact, unchanged rows
> shouldn't even have to go back to the server.
> I hope you are including this kind of issue...
>
> Thanks
> Mike
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
> ----
> Michael Friedman
> mfriedma@alum.mit.edu
> +852 9458 6060
> www.Michael-Friedman.com
>
> Maintainer of the B2B_HK mailing list for B2B in Hong Kong and Greater
> China.  Send e-mail to b2b_hk-subscribe@egroups.com to subscribe.
>
> Maintainer of www.eChinaB2B.Net - the directory of B2B companies in
Greater
> China

Received on Sunday, 25 March 2001 03:03:17 UTC