Re: [Xsltforms-support] Declarative4all Overview?

[Gary K. <ge...@ru...>]

Thanks, Alain. Your explanation is very helpful, and thought-provoking. I imagine other new outsiders will also find it helpful.

 

A question, if you will indulge someone that doesn’t fully understand the XForms technology landscape yet. Why do we need a new XQuery engine? I believe XQuery on the server side is already well supported (but I could be misunderstanding something). It seems Fleur.js will allow also XQuery on the browser side, but I personally don’t see a use case for that. I’m sure I’m missing something…

 

--Gary

 

From: Alain Couthures <ala...@ag...> 
Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2021 11:20 AM
To: Gary Kopp <ge...@ru...>; xsl...@li...
Subject: Re: [Xsltforms-support] Declarative4all Overview?

 

When developing web applications, XForms, because it has been specified to be implemented in browsers, is not enough. 

 

XSLTForms is a client-side XForms implementation using XSLT 1.0 as a trick to transform XForms pages into HTML pages with CSS and Javascript. It works within browsers... 

 

XSLT 1.0 is still supported in major browsers, but vendors would like to get the corresponding memory space for new features instead... XSLTForms must evolve... 

 

Since 1.5, XSLTForms uses its own HTML5 notation for XForms. It allows authors, if they prefer this, to write forms directly without the XSLT step being required, which, is now also available in Javascript for Nodejs! BTW, Cordova supports this HTML5 notation, too. 

 

The XPath engine of XSLTForms is also evolving. The corresponding parser has been rewritten from XSLT 1.0 to Javascript. This parser has been extended to support XQuery 3.1. Then, a new XQuery engine has been created, named Fleur.js, for both browsers and Nodejs. 

 

We, also, have Nodejs to easily develop and run light HTTP servers. It allows XQuery at server-side (with Fleur.js) to access files, query other web servers, ... and XForms at client-side (with XSLTForms) to render and modify data. 

 

Next step: Fleur.js for XSLTForms is now in alpha... 

 

So, Declarative4all is a project to host all that stuff and more... It is the not-private part of the dev environment, actually... 

 

--Alain 

Le 29/03/2021 20:22, Gary Kopp <ge...@ru... <mailto:ge...@ru...> > a écrit : 

 

 

I’m new to XForms with eXist and quickly realized I needed XSLTForms to get started. I found XSLTForms 1.3 on Github and thought I was done, although I was concerned that it hadn’t been updated for years. Then I was given a link to Declarative4all and now see that XSLTForms is alive and quite well. But I’m a little confused – is Declarative4all just an xsltforms.js upgrade, or is there more to it from a functional standpoint? Is there a summary statement somewhere of what Declarative4all actually is?

 

--Gary Kopp

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