Re: [Exist-open] Current Status of XForms?

[Finian O'B. <fin...@gm...>]

Hi Gary,

All of my applications within eXist use XForms. I developed them using
betterForm, but when support for it was removed from eXist, I converted
them all to Orbeon using the Community Edition. I chose it because it
implements W3C XForms standard and because it supports a wide range of
form elements, but most importantly it is under current maintenance. I
run eXist 5.2.0 and Orbeon 19.2 CE, but do so in a way in which they
both run independently within the same servlet container - in my case I
use eXist's Jetty, but it is also possible to use Tomcat.

Orbeon and eXist work together to render XForms by using cross-context
communication within the servlet container: the Orbeon developers call
this separate deployment. Requests to eXist for an XForms page are
intercepted by a servlet filter within eXist's context and are passed
to Orbeon. The XForms/XHTML markup is transformed into an XHTML web
page with links to supporting JavaScript and CSS. This page is returned
to the browser from eXist, and the JavaScript/CSS requests are serviced
by the servlet filter.

Configuring this scenario requires a small number of changes within
both eXist and Orbeon. To summarise them for eXist you need to:

1. Amend web.xml to add a servlet filter and mappings to intercept
XForms pages
2. Copy orbeon-xforms-filter.jar to eXist's /lib directory
3. Disable betterFORM globally if it is included in your version of
eXist

For Orbeon you need to:

1. Download the latest version of Orbeon CE and place orbeon.war in the
servlet container
2. Disable the Orbeon Form Runner login service defined within web.xml
3. Create properties-local.xml to configure Orbeon to accept requests
from eXist

When I set it up I created a page that fits into the standard eXist
documentation explaining in detail how to effect these changes. I can
let you have that if you're interested.

Having said all of that, if I were starting from scratch I would
consider the alternatives to XForms. Although I have found eXist/XForms
very flexible and easy to use, it seems to me to be something of an
edge-case these days. I'm sure people here would have ideas as to more
modern technologies.

Finian


On Sat, 2021-03-27 at 18:52 -0600, Gary Kopp wrote:
> While I’m an experienced Java programmer, I am new to eXist, XQuery,
> and XForms. I wish to create an eXist XForms web application and
> right now I need a little guidance on where to start. I’ve installed
> the eXist demo apps, which includes an XForms restxq application. Of
> course it doesn’t work out of the box because no XForms processors
> are installed, neither betterform nor XSLTForms. Which should I
> install – or rather, which currently works? Betterform is no longer
> included with the eXist distribution. It is available for download
> from Sourceforge as betterform-install-5.0rc5.jar but I can’t find
> any actual instructions for installation/configuration. Should I
> bother with it? As far as XSLTForms goes, I wanted to see a sample of
> a client-side page, and the documentation provides a link to
> hello.xml for this, but that page doesn’t seem to exist anywhere. Any
> help here?
>  
> While I’m at, I guess I could consider Orbeon Forms (community
> edition). It deprecated eXist support, but I’m guessing it’s still in
> the code. Any success/failure stories to share?
>  
> Thanks in advance from a newbie.
>  
> --Gary Kopp
>  
>  
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