In a recent post, James Governor talked about the upcoming XForms 1.1 specification and how IBM is supporting it in Workplace, refering to an article written by John Boyer, Senior Product Architect for IBM Workplace Forms and co-chair of the XForms working group. Intalio is using Orbeon’s open source implementation of XForms for Intalio|Workflow, and I asked my good friend Alessandro Vernet what their plans were regarding version 1.1 of the specification. Here is a transcript of his answer.

“We are 100% committed to the XForms standard. We are implementing new features of the upcoming XForms 1.1 and we are actively contributing to the development of the specification as members of the XForms working group.

I have to say that I am particularly happy with the new additions in XForms 1.1. The essence of these improvements is well summarized in the XForms 1.1 abstract: “address the immediate needs of the forms community”. Improvements in XForms 1.1 are often simple, but add a lot of power to XForms, and ultimately make the job of the form author even easier.

In addition to supporting features from XForms 1.1, there is also more coming up in PresentationServer, our AJAX-based XForms server. For instance, we’ll have very soon a number of cool new AJAX widgets, including an auto-complete field (think Google Suggests), a menu, and a tree. All these widgets are implemented using a special appearance on an existing XForms control. So as a form author, there is nothing new to learn to use these new widgets, and most importantly, no JavaScript programming is needed.

We have already implemented some of the items mentioned in John Boyer’s post:

DELETE method
We do support the DELETE method and we use it today in a number of applications to interact with the eXist XML database directly from XForms using the eXist REST API.

Dynamic submission URL
We support this using with “attribute value templates”, as in XSLT.

Detailed information about an XForms submission error
With XForms 1.0, you know when a submission fails, but you don’t have detailed information on why it failed. For instance, assume you are POSTing an XQuery with XForms to your eXist database. If everything works well, you will get the result of your XQuery back. But if the query fails, for instance because the XQuery is invalid, you would like to know how to access the error returned by eXist to give detailed feedback to the end-user. This will be possible with XForms 1.1, and our customers have requested it, so we’ll be implementing this soon.

If only one more feature of XForms 1.1 had to be mentioned, it would be the conditional execution of actions, which we also have recently implemented in our XForms engine. It goes without saying that adding an “IF” construct is not a minor feature. Now the form author can implement more business logic in a declarative way directly within XForms.”

Now, there are a couple of things that make Orbeon’s PresentationServer a good alternative. First, at $25,000 a CPU, IBM Workplace is not exactly cheap. PresentationServer is free. Second, Intalio|BPMS 4.1 now comes with a WYSIWYG XForms editor running in Eclipse, which makes it a lot easier to develop complex forms than having to write the code by hand.

Even better, the upcoming 4.2 release scheduled for early July is adding support for magnetic grids and process-driven pageflows, while the 4.3 release that should become available in September or Ortober this year will add support for the graphical definition of complex event handlers. The later might even be part of a project we will manage through our Demand Driven Development program.