November 1, 2007
XForms and Rich Text Editing
Over at Developerworks, Steve Speicher and Andy Smith show some approaches for adding rich text editing controls to an XForms application.
By following some of the integration rules defined by XForms, XBL, and a rich text editor, the end result is a simple and powerful addition to the XForms set of controls. This can further enable the application of XForms in a variety of applications, such as blogs, e-mails, social networking sites, and more. These can then leverage the built-in capabilities of XForms for validation, XML submission, declarative programming, and more.This kind of thinking reminds me of some of my early thinking about XForms in particular and XML-based forms in general. When does a form end and a text editor begin?
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:16 PM
October 19, 2007
Does XForms Technology Have Momentum?
I have a few Google news and blog alerts that help me keep track of some technologies of interest. One is for XForms, which I receive as a daily digest, and I always get something every day, usually four or five items, almost all from blogs. Almost every item is technical and fairly in-depth, usually about something the blogger is prototyping or developing. I compare this to my alert for InfoPath, which doesn't come every day, and the items that do trickle in are rarely technical. Usually they are PR about a product, where InfoPath is mentioned in a list of technologies that the product works with. In fairness to Microsoft, I just played with a search for "forms services" in blogs, and got more hits from that, so I will set up an alert. Interestingly though, in Google blog search, I get a total of 2,016 hits for "forms services" and 35,585 for XForms.
In today's XForms alert, John Boyer of IBM offers some ideas for talking to C-Level types about XForms. For John, the business value of XForms comes down to this:
Read the whole thing.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:28 AM
October 13, 2007
Here and There
- Apparently, if it's online, it's trustworthy..
- MarketingSherpa has an interesting case study of how a newspaper tackled a redesign as it entered its 10th year online.
- Innondata Isogen offers a Post-Hype Playbook for the eBook marketplace.
- Imagine a whole evening of presentations on XForms.
- Adobe unveils "Thermo" and some other new technologies
- Quark users might be interested in a new resource site, Planet Quark.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:08 PM
February 14, 2007
WS-AreYouEvenStillReadingThis
Writing for IBM developerWorks, Elliotte Rusty Harold offers Ten Predictions for XML in 2007. I've always liked Elliotte's work. When SGML was giving way to XML, Elliotte wrote the first good book about XML, and he has gone on to write several more. His XML in a Nutshell is the book I always recommend to people looking for a solid overview and authoritative first reference, so his predictions mean something. He weighs in on a number of topics you would expect to hear about (XQuery, XForms, open document formats), and some that are less well known (the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP)). But the thing that really caught my eye was his skepticism about Web Services. The money quote: "Enterprises have absorbed as much Web services machinery as they're able to stomach. Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and SOAP 1.2 are the end of the line. Many enterprises won't even get that far. WS-Choreography, WS-Transport, WS-Reliability, WS-Security, WS-Resource, WS-ServiceGroup, WS-BaseFaults, WS-Messaging, WS-KitchenSink, and WS-AreYouEvenStillReadingThis won't leave the station."
Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:47 AM
