As the maker of XSLTForms, a client-side implementation of XForms 1.1, I have chosen XForms to develop professional web applications heavily based on XML. XForms 1.1 is now a mature technology including a complete set of required capabilities. Coupled with Native XML Databases, XForms is the interface element of the XRX architecture, which permits analysts to develop effective applications without any procedural source code.
-- Alain Couthures, Chief XML Architect, agenceXML
XForms 1.0 ushered in a new way to create web and desktop applications, but it did have limitations. XForms 1.1 not only addresses these limitations, but adds a range of new features that make it easier for authors to manipulate data. Backplane is pleased to see this new specification from the W3C, and is excited to see that it has already encouraged a new round of interest in the technology. We're also proud to have been involved in the standard, particularly as implementers of XForms processors, such as Ubiquity XForms and formsPlayer.
-- Mark Birbeck, CEO and CTO, Backplane Ltd.
The Chiba project as one of the early implementors of the XForms 1.0 specification congratulates the Working Group on its fantastic work on XForms 1.1. Even it's only a minor version change it's a major step forward not only for XForms but for the whole XML world now allowing XML to be used from front to back. In our many year of work on and with XForms we were repeatedly astonished by its flexibility and power not only for simple forms but also for the most complex web applications. The open attitude of the WG and responsiveness to the general public helped a great deal to make it a real-world technology. The Chiba project has served many projects with XML solutions ranging from risk mangement to bpm, from science to financial and from medical to aeronautical applications. We'll continue to work on our open XForms implementation to offer rapid application development to our customers with the help of the XML family of languages.
-- Joern Turner, Founder and Admin, Chiba Project
As the first non-military Internet site in Europe, CWI has always striven to be at the forefront of Internet technology, and to feed research results into actual use. Our involvement with HTML, CSS, XHTML, SMIL, XForms, and the Semantic Web work at W3C is part of that aim. Through its declarative approach, XForms has proved itself enormously valuable in producing applications, reducing authoring time, improving the user experience, and easing machine-to-machine communication. This new version improves all those aspects, and we are delighted to see it reach recommendation status.
-- Jan Karel Lenstra, Director, CWI (the Dutch National Research Institute for Mathematics and Informatics)
I have used XForms for many projects including Real Estate Forms, Metadata Registries, Requirements Analysis, Use Case Analysis and overall project management. I have found XForms to be simple and yet powerful. The fact that XForms has only around 21 basic elements means that it is easy to learn and also easy for me to automatically generate these XForms from XML Schemas.
XForms represents a shift from the nightmare of hundreds of incompatible JavaScript libraries to a single standard that we can base web application development on. XForms combined with new features that we hope to see in HTML-5 such as the datagrid will provide most web application developers with a new library of easy-to-use and easy-to-maintain web components.
I have also found that the integration of XForms MVC architecture to work very well with REST and native XML data stores. The makes the entire process of converting XML into objects and then again into relational data completely unnecessary. This is driving many new web application architectures such as XRX and adding fuel to the NOSQL movement.
-- Dan McCreary, President, Dan McCreary & Associates (Enterprise Data Consultants)
Dreamlab Technologies AG congratulates the W3C on the release of XForms 1.1 as Recommendation. As an early adopter, contributor, strong supporter and implementor of XForms, Dreamlab Technologies would like to first of all thank the Working Group for an outstanding work in developing, maintaining and improving XForms in a remarkably consistent high quality throughout several years. Special thanks to the chairs of the Working Group, Steven Pemberton and John Boyer.
As a technology, XForms fulfills an important role in bringing single XML technologies together into a greater XML framework. From an internet security standpoint, an area in which Dreamlab Technologies demonstrates leadership, the overall solutions which XForms enables will fundamentally be more manageable and controllable than anything else in todays world of procedural short-term solutions. As internet transactions become more and more legally binding, this is an important additional aspect among the various other benefits of XForms already mentioned, and Dreamlab Technologies is proud to have contributed to this success and will continue to do so.
-- Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer, W3C AC Representative, Dreamlab Technologies AG
EMC congratulates the XForms working group with the new XForms 1.1 Recommendation.
XForms 1.1 is another major leap forward for this important XML technology which enables you to build end-to-end applications based on pure XML processing. EMC has been actively implementing this new specification into its currently shipping "Formula" forms product.
-- Jeroen van Rotterdam, General Manager XML Solutions, EMC Content Management & Archiving Division
As a founding member of the working group, current editor of the specification, and as an implementer, IBM Corporation is very pleased to see XForms 1.1 advance to a computing industry standard W3C Recommendation. As a client technology, XForms simplifies web-based application development and deployment. XForms includes powerful declarative constructs for rich interactivity in data collection, simplifying application design and maintenance. XForms enables a direct mapping to back-end XML data formats, smoothing the path from transaction schemas and vertical industry data standards to G2C and B2C web applications. XForms connects client-side XML to web services, simplifying integration with portal applications, databases, and business process services. XForms is flexible enough to provide these capabilities on desktops and mobile devices, in web pages, in flowing office-style documents, and in very high-precision user interfaces. Indeed, this substantial upgrade of XForms addresses many of the challenging problems faced by our customers as they seek to develop large web applications, and IBM already ships a number of commercial products that incorporate XForms 1.1.
-- John M. Boyer, Ph.D., Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM Lotus Forms
Inventive Designers is pleased to have participated in the process of XForms 1.1 to become a W3C recommendation. Our document platform Scriptura, based on the XML ecosystem (XSLT, XSL-FO, XForms,...) enables our customers to control their entire document flow, from composition and personalization to output production and delivery.We will continue to support W3C's XML standards, and XForms in particular, ensuring we can improve the way our customers communicate.
-- Klaas Bals, Chief Technology Officer, Inventive Designers
Orbeon is extremely pleased with the approval of XForms 1.1 as a W3C Recommendation. Contrary to what the small increment in version number suggests, XForms 1.1 is a major upgrade of the XForms specification and the result of solid feedback from XForms implementors over several years. In 2009 more than ever there is a strong need for an open, cleanly-designed foundation for online forms and applications. In this context we believe that XForms 1.1 is an important milestone and we are glad to have contributed to its development. We are looking forward to continue making XForms 1.1 and its successors a major part of Orbeon Forms.
-- Alessandro Vernet, CTO, Orbeon, Inc.
PicoForms is pleased to see the advancement of XForms and will continue to support XForms in our mobile products. With XForms 1.1 the standard has taken a major step forward in providing a solid foundation for data-centric services.
-- Kenneth Sklander, CTO, PicoForms
SATEC, as an implementor of the XForms specification in its products, i.e. DataMovil, strongly supports the advancement of the XForms 1.1 specification to a W3C Recommendation. SATEC believes that the enhancements introduced in the 1.1 version improve and facilitate the use of the specification to implementors and final users, as well as providing new functionality that widens the field of application.
-- Rafael Benito, Director - Vertical Solutions Engineering, SATEC
Xerox is pleased that XForms 1.1 has been made a W3C Recommendation, and looks forward to a variety of interoperable implementations of electronic forms and rich web applications for this ECM industry standard.
-- Leigh L. Klotz, Jr., Senior Software Architect, Xerox Corporation
XForms has long been an intriguing technology, a way of binding a complete user interface to an XML model that's vendor independent, portable, and capable of sophisticated validation and constraint modeling. It turns an XForms enabled client into a rich data editor at a time when rich data - XML - is increasingly becoming the de facto form in which we pass our data and data models back and forth. XForms 1.0 was a good start, but it had the same limitations that most first generation products have - not enough use cases to test all of its edge conditions, and those limitations held the technology back. XForms 1.1 takes seven years of thinking, experimentation, implementations and user feedback into account and unequivocably solves these problems hands down, while simultaneously remaining true to its underlying vision. It's much easier to work with, considerably more flexible, easier to implement and extend, and has taken advantage of the developments of the last half decade to incorporate up-to-date features, such as support for AJAX, Atom and SOAP, that make it useful both in RESTful and traditional SOA based distributed services. To put it simply, XForms 1.1 rocks!
-- Kurt Cagle, Managing Editor, XML Today (http://xmlToday.org)
2009-11-18