XForms: an Introduction

Steven Pemberton, CWI

XForms is a declarative language for applications, on the web and elsewhere.

Who uses it

It is a W3C standard, and in worldwide use, for instance by:

• KNMI, The Dutch Weather Service
• Many Dutch (e.g. Onderwijs, Kadaster) and UK government (eg legislation.gov.uk) websites
• BBC
• The British National Health Service
• the British Insurance industry
• FDA, the US Food and Drugs Administration
• a US State Department of Motor Vehicles
• the US Navy (in submarines)
• NASA (Jet Propulsion Laboratories)
• Verifone - a payment company, for configuring petrol pumps
• Xerox
• Yahoo
• Remia
• EMC

and many others.

Experience

Experience has shown that it greatly simplifies making applications.

Example: A company that makes big machines.

The user interface is very demanding — traditionally needed 5 years, and 30 people. With XForms this became: 1 year, 10 people. Do the sums. Assume one person costs 100k a year: then this has gone from a 15M cost to a 1M cost. They have saved 14 million! (And 4 years)

Example: Insurance Industry

Manager: I want you to come back to me in 2 days with estimates of how long it will take your teams to make the application.

(Two days later)

Programming person: I'll need 30 days to work out how long it will take to program it.

XForms person: I've already programmed it!

Example: NHS

The British National Health Service started a project for a distributed health records system.

• It involved 70 people.
• It cost billions.
• The hardware costs alone were £5 per patient.
• It failed.

One person in three years then created a system using XForms.

• Hardware costs are 1p per patient
• It runs on Raspberry Pi's
• It is now running in a number of NHS hospitals, and being rolled out in Ukraine

Learning it

If you want to start learning XForms, here are some steps:

• Hands-On Tutorial: takes you step-by-step through the language with exercises.
• Advanced Hands-On Tutorial: techniques and examples
• XForms Tutorial: not hands on, but leads you through the language.
  • Part 1: Introduces you to the basics, comparing it to similar facilities in HTML
  • Part 2: Introduces you to advanced features.
• Examples: There is an ongoing series of articles being published at XML.com:
  • An Introduction: An overview and a simple example.
  • Viewing Data: Displaying and searching data.
  • A Calendar: Dynamic data.
  • A Clock: XForms plus SVG.
  • A Game: Interaction.
  • A News Carousel: Displaying alternating information.
  • A Conference Website: Managing and updating live information.

  Some other examples:

  • Minesweeper in XForms: Another example game.
  • Maps in XForms: A Google-maps-style application. You can also watch it as a video.
• XForms Quick Reference

Implementations

(Some) Implementations:

• CM Pro (Netherlands)
• Enketo* (USA)
• Inventive Designers (Belgium)
• Jadu (UK)
• Orbeon* (USA)
• Seneca Smartsite (Netherlands)
• XSLTForms* (France)

XForms is also part of OpenOffice* and LibreOffice*

*=open source

If you know of more, or want to be added to this list, let me know.

Future

XForms version 2.0 is in preparation. If you want to get involved, join the group!

Steven Pemberton