Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Orbeon Forms 3.5 Final Released

It is with great pleasure that we are announcing the final release of Orbeon Forms 3.5!

Orbeon Forms is an open source forms solution that handles the complexity of forms typical of the enterprise or government. It is delivered to standard web browsers thanks to XForms and Ajax technology, with no need for client-side software or plugins.

Orbeon Forms allows you to build fully interactive forms with features that include as-you-type validation, optional and repeated sections, always up-to-date error summaries, PDF output, full internationalization, and controls like auto-completion, tabs, dialogs, trees and menus.

Orbeon Forms 3.5 features lots of enhancements over version 3.0, including:

  • The new Orbeon Forms tutorial

  • Improved client-side and server-side performance for large forms

  • Support for Safari, Opera, and Liferay portal

  • New and improved widgets including tree, menu, dialog, and background upload

  • Preliminary XForms 1.1 support

  • Numerous other enhancements and bug-fixes

The complete list of changes and is available at:

http://www.orbeon.com/ops/doc/home-changes-35

The latest example applications are online at:

http://www.orbeon.com/ops/

You can get Orbeon Forms 3.5 from the download page:

http://www.orbeon.com/forms/download

The Orbeon team hopes you will enjoy this release!

Friday, February 16, 2007

Deploying Orbeon Forms to Liferay

Orbeon Forms has had Liferay portal support for quite a while, but it turns out that we hadn't quite done everything we could to make it easy to deploy Orbeon Forms to Liferay. So we have just done the following:

  • The Orbeon Forms WAR file (ops.war) is now built in such a way that it can deploy directly to Liferay. There is no need to create your own descriptors or configurations to get started (of course you can always customize things later).

  • There is documentation explaining how you deploy to Liferay and add an Orbeon Forms portlet in just a few steps.

The great thing about Orbeon Forms and portlets is that Orbeon Forms hides the complexity of the Portlet API to allow most Orbeon Forms applications to work unmodified within portals. Here is how one of the Orbeon Forms example applications looks in a Liferay portlet:

Orbeon Forms in Liferay

If you try deploying Orbeon Forms to other JSR-168 compliant portals, please let us know the results!

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Elliotte’s Predictions for XML in 2007

Preface to Nostradamus Book

Elliotte Rusty Harold just wrote a piece at IBM developerWorks entitled Ten predictions for XML in 2007. In particular he predicts success for XQuery, the Atom Publishing Protocol, rejoices about seeing the XProc effort going forward, and also says that "XForms, by contrast [with Web Forms 2.0], is ready to take off."

We sure agree with Eliotte that XForms is ready to take off. The XForms 1.1 specification is almost ready to enter last call at W3C, and at Orbeon we have shown with Orbeon Forms that XForms in the browser is not a requirement to reap the benefits of the XForms technology.

Tuesday, February 6, 2007

Firebug 1.0 Video

Firebug Presentation

We already blogged about Firebug, a fantastic, must-have, and free Firefox extension for web developers. At Orbeon, we find Firebug invaluable to debug the Orbeon Forms platform but also XForms applications written with Orbeon Forms.

Well, version 1.0 of Firebug is just out, and Yahoo! has put up a video of a presentation by Firebug author Joe Hewitt showing off the less-known feature of Firebug. Even if you already use Firebug, you may learn a few useful tips from this presentation. We heartily recommend it.

Thursday, February 1, 2007

Orbeon Forms Instance Inspector

A lot can happen when you interact with an XForms page: events are dispatched, actions executed, submissions sent, and more. While you can have some visibility on those by enabling XForms logging in Orbeon Forms, an important part of the state of an XForms page is simply contained in the various XForms instances that you define in your page.

Wouldn't it be just great if you could peek right into the instances in real time as you develop XForms pages? That's exactly what the new Orbeon Forms Instance Inspector does. Enabling it in a particular page is as easy as adding the following line where you want the inspector to appear:

<widget:xforms-instance-inspector id="orbeon-xforms-inspector" xmlns:widget="http://orbeon.org/oxf/xml/widget"/>

And this is the result:

Orbeon Forms Instance Inspector

A few Orbeon Forms sample applications used custom mechanisms to display their instances for educational purposes. They now simply hook up the Instance Inspector.

The Instance Inspector remains quite simple at the moment: it allows you to select what model and instance you want to look at, and if you want to see as plain text or formatted. Suggestions for improvements are naturally welcome!