Re: [Xsltforms-support] Is XForms a failure to learn from?

[William V. <wve...@vi...>]

The problem with de facto is that they get replaced as fast as they become popular.

Now Google is working on polymer and surely all that angularjs  work will be thrown to the trash can soon.


Perdon por haber sido escueto, pero estoy escribiendo desde mi teléfono móvil.

El oct 15, 2014 1:39 PM, Paul Vanderveen <pva...@te...> escribió:
Interesting thread

We have integrated XForms into our product, and I would never say that XForms is a failure.  I do, however, think that for largely non-technical reasons the world has decided to go in other directions.  The work Alain's done with XSLTForms is phenomenal, but XML in general is being hit hard in favor of lighter weight protocols.   I think XSLT is safe in that there is no real competitor for transforming XML documents.  XQuery is questionable as a transformation technology (IMHO), but it is still the best way to query an XML database full of XML content.   But even large XML database proponents like MarkLogic are supporting JSON as well as XML these days.

At TerraXML we have recently decided to adopt AngularJS for our new front end work, and the more I learn about it the more I see just how many similarities it has with XForms.   The model may be JSON instead of XML, but it is uncanny how it almost has a feature to feature match with XForms.  Even some of the struggles we've had with XForms also come across when building an AngularJS forms (I call it trial and error programming).    XForms was on the right track, it just didn't get critical mass.   It needed somebody like Google to jump behind it and that didn't happen.  They jumped behind AngularJS instead.   I don't know what the future is for XForms, but our current plan is to support both XForms and HTML5/AngularJS for a time, but we will start migrate over to doing new forms using AngularJS.

Paul Vanderveen, Product Architect
TerraXML, Inc.