Re: [XForms] XForms and InfoPath

In a message dated 13/04/2003 23:02:42 GMT Daylight Time, 
ssadler@qlinktech.com writes:


> At my company we are in winding down our 5.0 release which fully integrates 
> XForms into or core workflow engine, replacing our proprietary forms 
> implementation. 

Shone,

I assume you mean "winding down" as in "completing" rather than "winding 
down" as in "abandoning"?

I would be interested to learn more of how you weld XForms to your workflow 
app.

We did take a look at MS’s Infopath and we liked two things about it 1) It 
was a 
> nice design tool for forms and 2) it was part of the MS Office suite, which 
> will of course help it to proliferate.  I do feel that success with 
> InfoPath will drive the demand for XForms.

Yes, I think the notions thrown into relief by both InfoPath and XForms are 
similar. The potentially very important thing is that if InfoPath and XForms 
do what they have the potential to do then business efficiency will be 
improved.

I am not pretending that such issues are easy to solve, but from a business 
point of view they are important to solve/improve.

  We do see an opportunity in using InfoPath as another means of rendering 
> XForms defined within our product.  From what I saw, Infopath did seem to be 
> overly complex.  Not from the form designer perspective, but from the 
> programmatic aspect.  There did not seem to be any “language/vocabulary” 
> for Infopath, instead it relied upon code generation (mainly XSLT). 
> Generating XSLs, XSDs, XML (default data), and one meta-data file all 
> within one zip file.  Also there did not seem to be any way of having a 
> self contained form defined in one file, since the XML instance data was 
> always a separate file that referenced the ZIP file through a URL.
> 

Interesting observations.

Microsoft have a track record of sometimes not getting version 1.0 quite 
right but, for important products at least, making substantive improvements 
in later versions.

Maybe MS will include XForms in InfoPath 2.0?

Andrew Watt

>  
> 
> Shone Sadler
> 
>