[Announcement] FormsPlayer beta

Hello all,

BACKGROUND
During the course of developing an internet application for a client, we
decided to standardise on the definition of the forms in the system. This
obviously meant using XForms.

However, as the project developed it became clear that to get complete
control over the UI and to interact with the back-end systems in a reliable
way, we needed something more than a simple XForms to HTML conversion. On
the one hand we wanted the control and reliability of a traditional
application, perhaps written in VB or C++, running on a private network, and
connected to internal databases. But on the other hand, we wanted a system
that could cope with users spread out across the internet, data that was
distributed across many servers - and we certainly couldn't be installing
new client software every time the system was upgraded.

But these are conflicting requirements; we do not believe that it is
possible to develop large, resilient, distributed applications using HTML
and JavaScript.
 
FORMSPLAYER
We therefore developed FormsPlayer, an XForms processor plug-in for Internet
Explorer 6 SP 1.

Once the processor had been installed on the client it meant that we could
'upgrade' the system, simply be altering the XForms forms.

BETA DOWNLOAD
Since there have been a number of comments on this list about the
availability of XForms processors in the major browsers, we've decided to
make this software available in its current form, as our contribution to
encouraging the wider adoption of XForms. Far from XForms being a technology
of the future, we believe it is very much something for today.

Of course, we hope in return to receive feedback and bug reports.

If you are interested in the software then please download it from:

	<http://www.FormsPlayer.com/>

You'll also find some simple samples that illustrate using XForms:

	* for multi-lingual applications
	* with the Design Science MathML plug-in
	* for easy interaction with Web Services

You may find of particular interest the Web Services samples; one shows how
to search Google, and the other shows the chaining of two Web Services
together, using the output of one as the input to the other.

Best regards,

Mark



Mark Birbeck
Co-author Professional XML and
Professional XML Meta Data,
both by Wrox Press

Managing Director
x-port.net Ltd.
4 Pear Tree Court
London
EC1R 0DS

E: Mark.Birbeck@x-port.net
W: www.x-port.net
T: +44 (20) 7689 9232

Received on Monday, 21 October 2002 13:35:40 UTC