Get ready for formsPlayer 1.5...get ready for XForms 1.1

Submitted by formsPlayer on Wed, 2007-07-11 12:08.

We've been working very hard on the latest version of formsPlayer, and we're getting close to completion. formsPlayer 1.5 is faster, has more control over styling, will implement all of XForms 1.1, and has new interfaces for save and resume, and XSL:FO. If you haven't taken a look so far, now might be the time to see what formsPlayer 1.5 has to offer, and start planning the transition from older versions.

Faster

The most important change that you'll notice is that version 1.5 is much faster than previous releases. We've optimised switch and case so that your forms load more quickly, and we've improved the performance of repeat, which will particularly help with your larger forms.

We've also made the switch to Microsoft's latest parser, MSXML 6. This has cured some of the memory issues in previous versions of formsPlayer, caused by MSXML 4.

Styling

You should also find you have much greater control over the styling of your forms. In previous versions of formsPlayer it was difficult to control styling on controls such as select and select1. As a consequence of the changes to repeat in version 1.5 you now have more flexibility when formatting selection controls, and we'll shortly be providing detailed documentation on the changes.

Get ready for XForms 1.1

formsPlayer 1.5 also includes support for nearly all of the new features in the forthcoming XForms 1.1 specification--and we'll have added the remaining few by the time of the final release of formsPlayer 1.5.

Save and resume, and printing

And if you're using formsPlayer embedded in your own application you'll find new interfaces that allow you to serialise the state of a form (for saving and resuming), and export a snapshot to XSL:FO (for PDF printing).