OW2 Annual Conference, April 1-2, 2009.

It is a last minute announcement but consider making it to the first OW2 Annual Conference in Paris over the next two days:

Open Source for the Computing Infrastructure

MAKE A DATE TO ATTEND THE FIRST OW2 ANNUAL CONFERENCE

Two days at no cost to you to discover the enterprise software that will set you free and boost your efficiency: come and take part in the first OW2 Annual Conference, April 1-2, in Paris, held during the Solutions Linux trade show.

Optimize your time: attending the first OW2 Annual Conference will also offer you the opportunity to visit the Solution Linux trade show, discover the latest developments in the OW2's leading projects and get to talk with the developers themselves.

Anticipate the future: come and discover how Ruby is evolving with lead Ruby language designer Yukihiro Matsumoto, and what comes next in Java for the enterprise with Java EE 6 specification lead Roberto Chinnici.

Broaden your knowledge: this year's program features over 30 presentations, speakers from Europe, Asia and the Americas, seven thematic sessions, four poster sessions and of course the "Best Use Case Award".

And it's all free! Thanks to our sponsors and partners, ANR, Bull, EBMWebsourcing, Engineering, eXo Platform, Ingres, INRIA, IPA, Orange Labs, and Xwiki, the conference is free of charge and open to all.

Just one condition, you must register at http://www.solutionslinux.fr. More information on the OW2 Annual Conference website at http://www.ow2.org/view/Events2009AnnualConference/.

Founded in January 2007 OW2 is an independent industry community dedicated to developing open source code middleware and to fostering a vibrant community and business ecosystem. The OW2 Consortium hosts some one hundred technology Projects, including Acceleo, ASM, Bonita, eXo Platorm, Funambol, JOnAS, Lomboz, Orbeon Forms, PetALS, SpagoBI and XWiki. Visit www.ow2.org

The state of Orbeon Forms, Part 2

Here is a summary of the recent Orbeon Forms developments:

1. Form Builder and Form Runner

We keep polishing Form Runner and Form Builder. In addition to the usual bug-fixes:

• Form attachments are attached to emails, and Form Runner is able to include values from form controls in email subjects.

• The Form Runner summary page is more configurable: there are new properties to hide the Created and Last Modified columns, values of type xs:dayTimeDuration have been added (eg "10 min 25 sec"), and documents that use namespaces are better supported.

• In noscript (accessible) mode, Form Runner properly shows all existing errors when the user presses the Save or Review buttons.

• Form Builder's dialogs are all internationalized and localized in English and French.

• Form Builder has a clearer mechanism to enter an "application name" and "form name".

• Form Builder supports a global components library as well as a library per application.

• Our Bookcast example form based on Form Runner is now called Bookshelf. It supports image uploads too!

2. Performance

• Local, optimized submissions, i.e. submissions to local pages/services without actually using HTTP, are improved and work better in separate deployment. A new property also allows optimized local submission using the servlet include mechanism. This is useful for submissions with replace="instance|text|none". See the new Documentation on local submissions.

• Orbeon Forms supports two different client-side event modes, including a new "deferred" mode which reduces the number of Ajax requests.

• In some situations where multiple Ajax requests were sent, we now just send one and avoid duplication of events in the request.

2. Notable features and bug-fixes

• Orbeon Forms deploys on Liferay 5 in addition to Liferay 4. We fixed lots of Liferay-related issues, and Orbeon Forms even supports running Form Runner and Form Builder within a portlet. Support has been added for Portlet 2 (JSR-268) resources (use OrbeonPortlet2Delegate portlet to enable JSR-268 mode).

• XBL components with local models and instances work within xforms:repeat, better handle HTML directly within XBL templates, and support xbl:script and xbl:style.

• xforms:input bound to a node of type xs:boolean works within xforms:repeat.

• xforms:submission supports submitting form values and uploaded files as multipart/form-data.

• File uploads, as well as xs:date, xs:time and xs:dateTime input controls work properly in noscript mode.

• xforms:output supports a new appearance, xxforms:download, which displays a link for, well, downloading the data pointed to by the control.

• xforms:input's extension attributes (xxforms:maxlength, xxforms:size, xxforms:autocomplete) can be dynamic using AVTs.

• xforms:input supports changes to the type of the bound node (xs:string, xs:date, xs:time, xs:dateTime, xs:boolean).

• xxforms:modal="true" on triggers is improved to prevent double submissions using the keyboard.

• xforms:message actions are executed during page initialization.

• A new configuration property allows you to enable the XForms Inspector without having to change your page.

2. Other

• Orbeon participated in the XForms face-to-face meeting at Google. See this Open Source at Google blog entry for more details.

• We have started running a series of XForms 1.1 test suite tests on Orbeon Forms. Our wiki shows the work in progress (your help on this is welcome!).

• We use the Orbeon Forms wiki more and more and we have also reorganized the XForms documentation a little.

That's it for this time. Enjoy, and don't forget to follow our updates on Twitter.