XForms in browsers howto?

Hi,

I had tested XForms in various manners (including some reasonably 
convoluted things) for some time a while back and come out of it with a 
good impression.

I now have a really complex application that I have been asked to 
develop, and that must run inside a browser (plugins being considered 
tolerable, multiple platforms being required). Since the UI needs to be 
quite convoluted, and for once could do with some more serious 
client-side validation, I figured I might see if XForms implementations 
running inside browsers were mature enough to run XForms, and therefore 
started implementing using XForms. I expected that things would be 
better than when I last had a chance to take a long look.

To say that it's been more of a fight than I expect would be an 
understatement. I hope it's the chaos leading to apotheosis but things 
seem to have become worse than they were.

I'll spare you the crashes from multiple Mozilla and Firefox versions on 
two OSs and the fighting against formsPlayer so it wouldn't display it's 
own stylesheet and popup (there's probably documentation on that, but I 
failed to find it though it might have been because I'd run out of 
patience at that point).

So, having skipped the rant, is there a) a viable mix of browser version 
(even nightlies) and plugin and/or XPI combo that will actually roughly 
work without crashes and annoyances, and b) any chance that within the 
upcoming say two months that these issues may be sufficiently addressed 
that one would consider selling an XForms based WebApp without feeling 
they're setting the customer up for endless trouble?

-- 
Robin Berjon
   Research Scientist
   Expway, http://expway.com/

Received on Thursday, 21 April 2005 20:12:55 UTC