Moving choices from one list to another in XForms
Thu, Jul 7th 2011 6:09p JohnBoyer A number of times recently, I've been asked how to create a pair of list boxes with arrow buttons between them that move the selected item from one list to the other in the direction of the arrow (if something is selected in the source list). As I did, you can easily use the IBM Forms Designer to create a simple form that has the two list boxes for the two lists. I used icecream flavors. The Designer automatically generates the XForms markup, such as the xforms:select1 elements and th [read] Keywords: ibm
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From the Data to the Glass: In the Information Architect's Corner
Thu, Apr 7th 2011 11:09p JohnBoyer I've recently realized that there are a few milestones to celebrate all at once here: This blog turned 5, my W3C XForms group age is 10, and this is the 100th exciting episode of the IBM Forms dW blog. I took a look back at what you, the readers, seem to like best, and those 2000-3000 hit entries are at the intersection of strong technical content and the confluence of open standards. How serendipitous! The power and value of the XFDL markup language underlying IBM Forms comes from the way it [read] Keywords: ibm
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Designing Success: Bring the Customer to the Enterprise by Bringing the Enterprise to the Customer
Thu, Mar 24th 2011 7:09p JohnBoyer Engaging with customers (or employees) involves collecting information from them. To sell an insurance product, for example, you need to know what kind of insurance, how much, who's it for, their age, and a whole raft of other information. This is how we end up being able to provide a customer with an insurance quote or product, a financial preapproval, a medical appointment, and this is how we process IT requests, support requests, purchase orders, expense reports, etc. If you're architect [read] Keywords: ibm
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IBM Forms wins top video demo award at Lotusphere 2011
Thu, Feb 3rd 2011 7:36p JohnBoyer One of the New IBM Forms 4.0 Demonstrations has just won the top-rated video award at Lotusphere. This is a fantastic victory for the Websphere Portal segment of Lotus, which focuses on products like IBM Forms that create and provide exceptional web experiences. It is also a victory for the W3C XForms standard since the Wizard Creator featured in the video is, as far as I know, the first point-and-click design experience for an XForms switch. This feature exemplifies the principle that [read] Keywords: ibm
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IBM Forms 4.0 Demonstrations
Mon, Jan 17th 2011 10:42a JohnBoyer The hit rate on my last blog announcement about IBM Forms 4.0 makes it clear that the release is pretty big news. I'm very pleased about that because it is a *major* release, both technically and in terms of the corporate branding. Corporate branding is not a decision lightly made, so it took the time it took, and meanwhile we didn't want to delay the technical features hitting the market, so you'll see some references to "Lotus Forms" under the covers of the main IBM branding. Not to [read] Keywords: connections
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Advancing XForms at the Face to Face Meeting
Thu, Oct 28th 2010 6:46p JohnBoyer As the XForms working group gears up for our face-to-face meetings next week, I can't help but be energized by the selection of features we are working on for XForms 1.2 (http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/wiki/Category:XForms12).If you have a look at the linked page, you can get an idea of the current feature pipeline as well as some initial text describing each feature. Here's some further commentary on selected features.I look forward to improvements to the available XPath function library. [read] Keywords: application
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Migrating to Model-Centric Data Validation
Fri, Sep 24th 2010 11:24a JohnBoyer For a very long time, the XML language underlying Lotus Forms (called XFDL) has offered an option element called to describe data type, validity constraints and presentational formatting for the (valid) values of form controls (called XFDL items, like text entry fields, selection popups, and so forth). Neither a whole Lotus Form document, nor the XForms instance data it contains, can be submitted to a server unless all relevant data type and validity constraints are satisfied. However, the e [read] Keywords: lotus
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On the Value of Being an XML Technology
Fri, Jul 23rd 2010 12:56p JohnBoyer In a prior blog entry, I told you about the powerful data-driven dynamism available in Lotus Forms due to the features of XForms. I used the example of a Questionnaire or Survey that used an in an XFDL to expand to any length of survey and respond to a mixture of question/answer types.One the one hand, this is a neat, easy to understand example that helps you understand how a Lotus Form could dynamically respond to web service query results that arrive during the form interaction experience. [read] Keywords: ibm
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The Illusion of a Web SOA distinct from Enterprise SOA
Fri, May 21st 2010 5:53p JohnBoyer In "enterprise" service-oriented architectures (SOAs), XML is a clearly entrenched format for server-to-server communications. But there's a movement afoot to define a "Web SOA" as a separate entity that describes server-to-client communications... based on JSON as the format.The rationale is that JSON parses "a hundred times faster" in a web browser than does XML. This is like the tail wagging the dog. It is a myopic, accept-the-status-quo approach to web application computing, and i [read] Keywords: ibm
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Data-driven Table User Interfaces
Fri, Apr 23rd 2010 6:27p JohnBoyer A customer asked me recently how they could use XForms constructs to create a form that dynamically populates a table with available products that can be ordered based on selection of a product provider. In this case, the customer also wanted to have the product order list be editable once provided, allowing the user to delete rows or even to add more rows to the product order table initially provided for the selected store. Seemed like another good example for the blog.So, suppose you hav [read] Keywords: application
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Creating a Dynamic Questionnaire Template with a Lotus Form
Wed, Mar 24th 2010 5:49p JohnBoyer As an example of the powerful data-driven dynamism available in Lotus Forms due to features of XForms, I'd like to take you through a brief conceptual tour on the focused example of creating a Lotus Form template for a Questionnaire or Survey. This template is able to handle not just any number of questions and any amount of question text, but also any kind of answer type. And all of this would be controlled by the data so that the actual design of the Lotus Form template is the same.The powe [read] Keywords: lotus
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Spotlight on XForms 1.1 Features in Lotus Forms
Thu, Mar 4th 2010 7:12p JohnBoyer Lotus Forms has supported XForms for a number of years now, and you can get a good idea of all the features supported from the XFDL reference manual.However, now that XForms 1.1 has been finalized, I've had a number of questions about shining a spotlight on the XForms 1.1 specific features in Lotus Forms. Quite a number of XForms 1.1 features were improvements to the semantics of pre-existing XForms 1.0 features, and no small number of those improvements were based on feedback from the IBM [read] Keywords: ibm
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Looking forward to XForms 1.2 Progress
Mon, Jan 4th 2010 12:47p JohnBoyer As we start off the business of a new decade, I already find myself looking forward to the improvements in XForms 1.2. I know, I know, we just released the XForms 1.1 Recommendation, which contained a huge bundle of new features and architectural improvements. Still, the working group has been energetically advancing on still more features and improvements even as we closed the loop on the W3C process in the latter half of last year. I am very pleased with the completion of XForms 1.1, but the [read] Keywords: collaboration
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XForms 1.1 is a W3C Standard
Tue, Oct 20th 2009 3:24p JohnBoyer The theme song to Star Trek started to play in my head last night when I thought about the imminent publication of XForms 1.1 as a W3C standard (which the W3C calls a Recommendation). It's been five years since I started putting the working group's content into the first "thin spec" working draft of XForms 1.1.Since that time, the working group has substantially upgraded XForms to enable it to better address the emerging requirements of cutting edge web applications and interactive docume [read] Keywords: ibm
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Announcing New Release of Ubiquity XForms
Tue, Sep 1st 2009 5:20p JohnBoyer Ubiquity XForms version 0.7 is now available. In addition to contributing to the recent advancement of XForms 1.1 to Proposed Recommendation, this new version has many new features, fixes and highlights. Personally I'm happiest with the progress on implementing submissions, but that may be a bit of bias because I contributed some code to deal with aspects of submissions such as serialization, validation and relevance pruning. On the other hand, I contributed code in other areas, so maybe it' [read] Keywords: applications
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XForms 1.1 to Transition to Proposed Recommendation
Fri, Aug 14th 2009 4:31p JohnBoyer The XForms 1.1 specification was approved for transition to Proposed Recommendation. Publication as a Proposed Recommendation is currently expected next Tuesday.In order to achieve this transition, we presented a report of multiple implementations of XForms based on an expansive test suite, we presented the disposition of all formal comments received on the candidate recommendation, and we presented the important changes, which were those changes that the community would reasonably want to hea [read] Keywords: community
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Verifying XML Signatures on Lotus Forms Documents
Wed, Jul 29th 2009 6:18p JohnBoyer Back in March, I wrote about the open standards basis of Lotus Forms documents. This entry included comments on the use of the XML Signatures standard in combination with XForms within the XFDL markup of Lotus Forms.Now I'd like to draw your attention to a developerWorks article we've now published on the technical details of Verifying Lotus Forms XML Signatures with Java. This article explains how a JSR 105 compliant implementation, such as can be found in the Apache security library or in Ja [read] Keywords: ibm
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XForms, XFDL and Lotus Domino
Mon, Jun 22nd 2009 11:37a JohnBoyer Just ran across a good developerWorks article on Integrating Lotus Forms with Lotus Domino. Domino is a web application and web services platform that is often used in combination with the Lotus Notes rich client platform. However, as this article shows, it is possible for Domino to have broader reach out to all web browsers without a large client-side installation. The intelligence and interactivity of XForms are combined with the high precision presentation layer of XFDL to describe a rich cli [read] Keywords: domino
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Consuming DB2 Web Services with Lotus Forms
Fri, Jun 12th 2009 2:45p JohnBoyer Check out this developerWorks article for a step-by-step guide to deploying a DB2 web service and then consuming that web service using the Lotus Forms Designer.Once the WSDL for a particular DB2 web service is pulled into your Lotus Forms Designer, you select and autogenerate a data instance and a specific service, drag-and-drop the data instance onto the design canvas to autocreate the user interface, and then generate the run-time XForms submission for the service. The article above shows exa [read] Keywords: ibm
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The Way Forward for HTML5
Fri, Jun 5th 2009 12:39a JohnBoyer Despite all the excitement about the possibilities that HTML5 offers for a better world wide web, I believe there is a critical flaw in the go-forward plan of those who are feeling the momentum.The problem is that they still haven't got ~80% of the web browser makers on board!By which I mean they haven't got you-know-who.There's really only one way to break the loggerjam and move forward with advancing thestate of the web. We need to get you-know-who out of the way of progress by showingthat [read] Keywords: application
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Angels and Demons... and XForms
Fri, May 29th 2009 6:19p JohnBoyer So, I went to the movies recently and saw the new Dan Brown flick Angels and Demons. Probably not much of a spoiler to mention that the plot suspense is derived from the need to defuse an antimatter bomb placed somewhere in Vatican city, and everybody's favorite symbologist is called in to decipher the clues that may help lead to its location.And they only have until midnight to find it. And the baddies are going to kill a Cardinal every hour before the big bang just to prove how serious they a [read] Keywords: application
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It's a happy birthday...
Mon, Apr 27th 2009 11:57a JohnBoyer Happy birthday to me!Here's to XForms ubiquity;In FireFox and IE.Happy birthday to me!But seriously folks, IBM is a proud sponsor and contributor to the Ubiquity XForms open source project, and the Lotus Forms team has exciting plans for capitalizing on the ability to have XForms support directly within a web page.Gone is the distorting lens of limitations imposed by the fraction of language features that the dominating browser makers are prepared to support today. The Ubiquity movement is all [read] Keywords: ibm
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The open standards basis of XFDL and the value of Lotus Forms documents
Thu, Mar 26th 2009 4:40p JohnBoyer A Lotus Form is a document currently expressed in an XML vocabulary called XFDL (html version, pdf version).This is significant enough, in and of itself, to be set off in a paragraph. XML is a de facto industry standard from the W3C, and this means that widely deployed, interoperable, industry standard software toolkits can be used to introspect and manipulate the content of XFDL, i.e. Lotus Forms documents, thus mitigating issues of vendor lock-in.But the story gets better...The XFDL format int [read] Keywords: ibm
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The spectrum: From Enterprise to Line-of-Business Applications with Lotus Forms and XForms
Fri, Feb 20th 2009 6:31p JohnBoyer Well, my frieds, it seems a good time to draw your attention to a collection of available resources that can help you understand how you and your customers can address a full spectrum computing requirements, from the enterprise information application all the way down to the simple design-deploy-collect-analyze pattern for situational applications that arise throughout the enterpriseFirst of all, check out the Lotus Forms Enablement videos on YouTube. There are videos that show Lotus Forms in ac [read] Keywords: ibm
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Lotusphere
Thu, Jan 15th 2009 6:26p JohnBoyer I'm about to start packing my bags to head out for Lotusphere 2009. Sunday is Business Development Day (BDD), and I'll be presenting at the Futurists Panel on Dual Forms: An open standard office document mashup for document-centric business processes, and the broader context of Interactive Documents as Web 2.0 Applications. I'm very pleased to be part of such an exciting panel, which also includes Mary Beth Raven (of Notes fame, speaking on task management) and Mathew Flaherty (from the Lotus [read] Keywords: ibm
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Separating Form from Function
Mon, Dec 22nd 2008 9:20a JohnBoyer The W3C Forms Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of XForms for HTML.XForms for HTML provides a set of attributes and script methods that can be used by the tags or elements of an HTML or XHTML web page to simplify the integration of data-intensive interactive processing capabilities from XForms. The semantics of the attributes are mapped to the rich XForms model-view-controller-connector architecture, thereby allowing web application authors a smoother, selective migratio [read] Keywords: application
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Web 2.0 Process Democratization for the Non-Technical User
Tue, Nov 25th 2008 1:03p JohnBoyer As the world wide web transforms from a vehicle of information dissemination and e-commerce transactions into a writable nexus of human collaboration, the Web 2.0 technologies at the forefront of the tranformation may be seen as special cases of a more general shift in the conceptual application model of the web. The classic 3-tier model has the web browser and OS on a thin client tier, the traditional server tier offerings for data persistence and workflow or business process managment, and a f [read] Keywords: collaboration
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Going Beyond Office with Interactive Office Documents
Tue, Oct 28th 2008 3:49p JohnBoyer For over 15 years now, the solutions built with the software products from the IBM Lotus Forms team have been based on a simplifying system architecture depicted below. This architecture uses a sophisticated, intelligent XML document as the unit of information that flows among collaborators in a business process.To support such high-value intelligent interaction, the document has a numberof layers as depicted below. These layers have different responsibilities. Foundationally, the document forma [read] Keywords: ibm
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Document Engineering Smorgasbord
Mon, Oct 6th 2008 5:28p JohnBoyer My last blog was about the best paper winner at the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, and I mentioned there that I'd make another post to give you an idea of the breadth and depth of the papers presented. So, the bad news is you'll have to wait one more post for me to tell you about my own papers because I want to keep the focus on other people's ideas, and so the good news is that this is that follow-on post.I can't tell you about every paper, nor even get close, and omissions here sho [read] Keywords: ibm
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On the Best Paper at the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering
Sat, Sep 20th 2008 6:24a JohnBoyer I'm just leaving Sao Paulo after attending the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering. Great conference (people and technical content). I'd like to say more about a number of the other papers, but I'll focus here on the one that won this year's Best Paper Award: Enabling Adaptive Time-based Web Applications with SMIL State by Jack Jansen and Dick Bulterman. The paper presents a very interesting mix of SMIL, XForms and other technologies to enable end-users to customize their experience of con [read] Keywords: applications
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The "Ubiquity" Strategy for Promoting W3C Standards Adoption with AJAX and Modularization
Wed, Aug 27th 2008 6:07p JohnBoyer At the specification level, the W3C Forms working group is working on modularization of XForms as one means of promoting incremental adoption. This is following the simple business axiom that "embrace and extend" is economically preferable to "rip and replace". If you have existing web applications, and you want to start incorporating selected features of XForms to get at certain benefits, it helps to be able to get at just those features without having to change your entire application over [read] Keywords: ajax
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