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

[Joern T. <joe...@gm...>]

Finian,

On Sun, Mar 28, 2021 at 10:01 AM Finian O'Boyle <fin...@gm...>
wrote:

> 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.
>
> A lot of setup right? And it was similar with betterFORM which had quite
the same architecture as Orbeon. Also here the problems start as the
provided (generated) JS, CSS code for understandable reasons has to commit
to a certain client-side framework and provide a complete set of controls.
The conceptual mapping from abstract UI control in XForms to real-world
controls caused another complexity. Which is all fine and good as long as
you don't need that special control that's not provided or not in the form
you'd like. All in all the architectures of Orbeon and betterFORM are quite
heavy though very powerful. But they come to a significant cost in terms of
knowledge and maintenance.


> 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.
>
XForms and eXist-db of course fit extremely well as you're dealing with XML
through the whole stack without any mapping whatsoever. That in itself is
IMO a big selling point.

As for the 'more modern' technologies - the XForms architecture is still
outstanding in the area of form processing IMHO but it could be dedusted ;)
Fore is an attempt to do that purely client-side (but with server-side
validation support) in native browser technologies plus XPath/XQuery 3

Yep - it's beta

Joern


> 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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