AND ...

Reading all of today's posts convince me that the interest and the need for
xForms is alive and well (it's been quite quiet so far this year).

My colleagues and I have tried very hard to produce the "WYSIWYG tool for
the masses" that Mr Harrison laments, perhaps it lacks some of the puritan
syntax that other design offerings have, but it is undeniably fast and easy
to use, and it works well with Deng, xSmiles, the Novell Beta, and,
commercially, it works extremely well with both FormsPlayer and FormFaces;
two very different and very excellent products, to enable the production of
extraordinarily powerful web-apps remarkably quickly, and to show that
xForms can be used to produce prescriptive solutions in almost no time at
all.

Having spent a lot of man-hours on our solution, I have come to realise that
one of the problems of the xForms spec is that it almost too good; it tries
to be all things for all people; the techies an get heavily involved in
intricate mark-up, and yet it aims to solve an obvious problem of hugely
varying platform integration. Trying to explain to the "unconverted" what
this is about is always a different task, but I have found that there is
always something that strikes a chord with people at every level between
highly technical and totally non-technical, purist and the business driven.

xForms is *@your-own-expletive* excellent. As a concept it doesn't obviate
any of the other XML Forms Languages, it works with them. It doesn't
prescribe a host or technology, it suggests a methodology. It is
theoretically possible to integrate it with an enormous variety of other
technologies, with browsers, yes, but also with alternative "browsing"
devices, with other hardware, with other software, with embedded databases
... the bounds are limitless for visionary adopters to take this technology
forward to bring a real harmony to IT and other systems.

A lot of highly intelligent people have put a lot of effort into this, it is
not just an idea that occurred to someone in the pub one evening, I
sincerely hope that this moves towards bringing some kind of harmony to the
disparate sources of information that rule our day to day lives, and some of
the completely viable suggestions that have been made to me suggest that
this will be the case.

Thanks to everyone who has had input into this specification (especially,
but not just, the "Titans").

Regards to you all,

Rob



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