RE: AJAX vs. Xforms

> For what it's worth, I don't include Chiba and Orbeon in this class. 
> Those I haven't used. I think those projects have problems 
> too, but they're of a different nature. I'm not convinced of 
> the feasibility, usability, or maintainability of a primarily 
> server-side solution; but that's an argument for another thread.
> 

I've said this before,
	I'm not convinced of the feasibility, useability, maintainability or security of clientside solutions.

I think clientside Xforms has a serious problem with keeping secrets.
HTML forms are incapable of sending emails by
themselves (and many other functions), and where they require secrets to be
kept from the client they need lots of help, usually by means of serverside
function. 
If I want my Xform Submission to send an email then I have to
include that/those email address(es) in the Xform!, If I dont then I'd have
to code it as a completely separate serverside function and thats not what
Xforms is about. What about a case where I need to send a username and/or
password to retreive data from a 3rd party? (perhaps the isp for example
holds a subscription to some content service and it can only be accessed by
supplying user/pass - but that information should NOT be revealed to the user
of the form.) With a 100% clientside implementation I think this is
impossible.
With a serverside Xform implementation at least I can use Xforms as it was
intended with all its functionality in tact without the huge security issues
potentially associated with sending too much data to the client.
This is the reason I think that the current serverside implementations that
people are describing as a stop gap measure until Xforms becomes ubiquitous
amongst the big browsers will be around a lot longer than that.

its just my opinion, but I think these are big problems with using a 100%
clientside solution in many cases. I can however also see cases where having
the option to run clientside would be helpful - when the server isnt
available for example.
It would be helpful sometimes to be able to pick and choose which parts of a
forms models and views were suitable for 100% client only processing and
those which should never be used by the client directly.

my 2 cents
Jason.

Received on Monday, 7 November 2005 11:00:11 UTC