[ubiquity-xforms] Ubiquity Roadmap

[lacco]

Hi,

we are currently evaluating (client-side) XForms engines and I tried
out Ubiquity. The samples from the SVN doesn't work (http://
groups.google.com/group/ubiquity-xforms/browse_thread/thread/
946648b2f3ddd09f), and there are any source code updates since one
month.

That is why I would like to ask for a more explicit roadmap for
Ubiquity - for example, the project page talks about XForms 1.1
support and exchanging underlying Ajax library. So is there a plan for
an ongoing development & maintenance for Ubiquity, or is there a great
chance that the project is/ will be retired?

Thank you very much!

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[Mark Birbeck]

Hi,

UXF is very much being worked on!

However, one of the big changes that is taking place is a tidying up
of the test-suite, build environment, source control, and general
tooling.

I've been doing this, but I've been doing it in the context of an open
source project that imports the Ubiquity XForms library. When I get a
chance I'll be feeding those changes back to UXF, so I'm afraid that
I'm the main cause of the delay, and to some extent I'm holding up
some of the other core developers.

If you want to see some samples, you can look at backplanejs:

<http://backplanejs.googlecode.com/>

And I should be providing some updates shortly on the tools and some
bug-fixes I've made in backplanejs, which will go back into UXF.

Regards,

Mark

[lacco]

Thx for your answer which sounds very exciting. My problem is that I
have to decide for a XForms library within the next days/ weeks, and
even the backplanejs examples (http://backplanejs.appspot.com/samples/
xforms/xforms-hint.html) doesn't work in FF 3.6 right now. That's why
I am a little afraid of considering UXF as a possible candidate
although other alternatives are quite rare: I'm currently evaluating
to use XSLTForms or to move Orbeon Forms into an Java applet (since I
need client-side forms execution).

Despite of these "sorrows", I am highly interested in some UFX
examples. Since Orbeon Forms produce quite nice form controls like a
date picker with the YUI library (http://www.orbeon.com/orbeon/xforms-
controls/), and I would like to see how UFX handles those validations/
typed fields.

> > For more options, visit this group athttp://groups.google.com/group/ubiquity-xforms?hl=en.

>
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[bkc]

I just want to chime in and say "me too".

I developed several 'xforms applications' based on FF plugin for one
of my clients. Now that the FF plugin appears to be 'end of
life' (despite philipp wagner's builds, thanks!), I am struggling to
keep xforms relevant for my client.

They want to move to laboriously written client-side javascript
because I cannot make a good case for xforms. I am also looking at
uxf, xsltforms, betterforms, and orbeon.

so I am keen on UXF progress as well.

Thanks

[Leigh Klotz]

I believe UXF is the way forward, but for now, I'm using XSLTForms
from
Agence XML. It's lightweight and doesn't aim for 100% coverage, but
it
may be good enough.

Leigh.

[Mark Birbeck]

Hi everyone,

I do apologise. It's one of those things, where we have big plans, but
limited resources.

On the FF plug-in: I've often wanted to merge the work that they did
on that, with the work we did on our plug-in for Internet Explorer
(formsPlayer), which is now open source. Then we'd have one C++ XForms
processor that ran in multiple browsers, and could combine efforts to
keep developing it. (My thinking is that it would not only be a shared
code-base, it would also be a single application, at least for
Windows, anyway.)

If anyone thinks they could help with that, then please let me know.

On UXF: I'm hoping to port my backplanejs changes back pretty soon,
but for the next couple of weeks I'm going to have to continue
focusing on backplanejs. This is because we have a customer who is
paying for some IE-related performance improvements, which are needed
for a project they are doing.

I'm not allowed to publicise this project until June, but it's a great
illustration of the use of XForms and UXF for the purchase of
financial products online. Hopefully this is the kind of thing that
will reassure people that UXF most definitely has a strong future.

(And to clarify, although we're using backplanejs for this project,
that library is simply UXF plus some other features, like an RDFa
parser.)

Which brings me finally to lacco's point (is it 'Kai'?) about FF 3.6
and backplanejs; could you tell me which sample you ran? Perhaps you
could raise a bug over on the backplanejs project with reference to
the sample, platform that you are using, and so on, and then we can
take a look?

Thanks.

I'll try to keep everyone posted on progress.

Best regards,

Mark

[Mark Birbeck]

Back again...

> Which brings me finally to lacco's point (is it 'Kai'?) about FF 3.6
> and backplanejs; could you tell me which sample you ran? Perhaps you
> could raise a bug over on the backplanejs project with reference to
> the sample, platform that you are using, and so on, and then we can
> take a look?

Sorry...I should have re-read your email. You do refer to the hint
sample. It seems that there is something specific about FF 3.6 that is
preventing UXF from operating correctly.

I'll look into this, but in the meantime, if you want to play around
with UXF/backplanejs whilst you're waiting, you can either use Google
Chrome (recommened...very fast), or get MultiFirefox and then install
FF 3.5 alongside your 3.6 version.

Regards,

Mark