Tutorial

A common use for browser toolbars is to make it easy to search for some information and get the results directly in the main browser window. All the main search engines have such toolbars, usually created using C++ and distributed via standard installers. But using the formsPlayer soft-bar library, we can create handy browser extensions for Internet Explorer using barely a few lines of XForms. To illustrate, we'll create a toolbar that uses the recently published API documentation for the popular Prototype Javascript Framework.

This tutorial is for people who are familiar with the basics of XForms, have knowledge of some server-side processing langauge, and want to combine the two. In this section we'll look at how to do this with PHP, ASP, Java Servlets and ColdFusion.

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This tutorial will be moved from www.formsplayer.com.

The component responsible for XHTML renderering in the Sidewinder Viewer provides a set of COM interfaces enabling it to be embedded inside other applications. This tutorial demonstrates how to achieve this in a simple C# project, although the same techniques may be applied to other languages and projects too.

Currently, the XBL bindings that we have made available allow for streaming video to be implemented in output via two players: Real Player and Windows Media Player.

To use them, simply put the URL of the stream in to the value attribute (this can be the result of an XPath expression if you like) and add an appropriate mediatype attribute ('audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin' for Real Player and 'application/x-mplayer2' for Windows Media Player).

For example:

  <xf:output value="'mystream.ram'" mediatype="audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin" />

XForms uses XPath expressions in many places, and it is important as an author to understand how these expressions are evaluated. Perhaps the most important concept is that of the evaluation context.