Tonight we had a user group meeting on XForms.
First let me tell you that I think it is a big shame that we don’t get Xforms capabilities in IE6 or in IE7.
It would get rid of all the javascript hassle and hoops we have to go through to get the simplest things done.
Anyway, I’ve been working with atlas a bit more now. And it is really cool just a shame that i can’t use other libraries in conjunction. But I still have to explore the animation api maybe if i can do things that i consider cool enough I don’t need other libraries any more.
Back to the user group meeting. Peter Nunn, the driving force behind a .NET XSP server application, came to give us a very passionate explanation on how xforms work and how they implemented them.
The effect you get is very similar to what I’m doing with ATLAS for the moment. Async pages that just get data from webservices, some might even call it SOA.
Where ATLAS gets cluttered combining 3 technologies in one page, Xforms does everything completely through xml. More clean… yes sir, more reusable .. yes sir, easily queriable.. yes sir.
Conclusion : we want more of where that came from but this time on every platform. Just once everybody should agree.. would make the life of a lot of developpers a lot easier :) Would probably put a lot of people out of business too.
Would i use it ? In the case where i develop for intranet applications i might be tempted to do so. As for my applications for uncontrolled environments (the internet) no thank you.
Xforms is only supported in firefox and while everybody is telling you how great mozilla is, my stats still show over 90% of my visitors use internet explorer. That being said, people trust plug-ins that are widely accepted like the flash plug-in. But people don’t tend to trust obscure plug-ins from sourceforge, or other unknown companies in my experience.
So I’ll continue the ATLAS path that I chose to take until there is cross browser XFORMS solution that has penetrated deeply enough in peoples living rooms.