fastStart your XForms application

The role that HTML forms now play in corporate information gathering should not be underestimated. Despite being a relatively basic technology, they are at the heart of many online information gathering and transaction processing applications. However, from the point of view of application developers and corporate information managers, HTML's simplicity is also a source of growing frustration. -- Phil Jones, Infoconomy -- On form?

This may sound all too familiar. Perhaps you have built an application for your company or customers, and instead of using a language such as C++ or Visual Basic, you opted for a server-side tool such as ASP or Struts. As a result, you would have successfully delivered HTML to the desk-top, and so reduced your deployment costs and made it easy for users to find their way around the data that your system provided.

But time has moved on. Your application is becoming more and more difficult to maintain. The quantity of code on both the server and client continues to grow as you try to provide the features your users need. And unfortunately, when you look around for a richer user interface (UI) you find either proprietary solutions such as Flash and Ajax that are also based on scripting, or complete environments such as Web Forms or XAML that bind you in to a particular platform. Web applications are becoming more and more difficult to design, build, test and maintain, at a time when things should be getting easier.

Our previous web applications used a lot of effort (in both development terms and during actual execution) to generate HTML pages. XForms allows for a much greater separation of concerns so that we now have static HTML pages and a set of "web services" to provide data. This has lead to an improved development cycle and a reduced level of hardware. -- Andy Heydon, VP, Software Development at CollegeNET

In XForms, we have for the first time a rich-client that is based on open standards. A growing number of organisations are discovering--and taking advantage of--the benefits of using mark-up to build complex UIs. They are enjoying at last the long promised separation of content from the UI.

But at the same time, many companies who have realised that XForms could solve their problems, are struggling to take advantage of this new language. Whether through lack of time and resources to devote to getting acquainted with the syntax, or a difficulty in designing their application architecture to build a truly distributed application, many are frustrated that they are making slow progress, when the rewards could be so great.

x-port.net Ltd. can help these companies to speed the process up. We have experience in building many types of internet applications, and we have developed the leading XForms processor, formsPlayer. Our team is skilled in both application architecture and form design, and can advise on using XForms in a wide range of situations, from Apache, Cocoon and MySQL, through to Drupal, eXist and OpenWFE, and on to systems using Microsoft Content Management Server, ASP.NET, and SQL Server. We can also discuss requirements to port formsPlayer to other devices such as mobile platforms and office equipment.

x-port.net's CEO, Mark Birbeck, has written and spoken on XML, RDF and XForms, and is an Invited Expert on both the XForms and HTML W3C Working Groups. He writes a blog called Internet Applications.

If you need to get your XForms project off to a fast start with best practice forms, and architecture from internationally recognised experts, then please contact us.