Rich Web Application Backplane XG Final Report

Charlie Wiecha, Chair (IBM)

Mark Birbeck (Invited Expert)

John Boyer (IBM)

Jack Jansen (CWI)

Steven Pemberton (CWI)

Gregory Rosmaita (Invited Expert)

The Backplane

HCG Workshop - Nov 2006 Amsterdam

Attending: CDF, DI/UBIWeb, HTML, MMI, SVG, SYMM, Voice, WAF, WAI, XForms and others

The XML Compound Document Architecture

Allows you to combine markups from different vocabularies.

Examples of its use: XSmiles, Joost

Joost

XSmiles

The Backplane Premise

Compound documents are easy to create, syntactically

Because of differences in processing models, the combinations can be difficult to manage.

Examples:

• Submission
• Event processing

The Backplane XG

Identify overlaps

Identify solution space

Actually do some implementation

Implementation strategies

Since mainstream browsers don't support compound documents in this way, what are the options for implementation?

• Server-side 'Compilation' (eg Chiba, Orbeon)
• Client-side transformation (+judicious Javascript) (eg XSLTForms)
• Client-side implementation (Using XBL and/or Unobtrusive Javascript) (eg SVGWeb, AmpleSDK, Ubiquity, FormFaces)

Advantages

With late binding of the User Interface/Presentation, you can achieve:

• Single authoring
• Device independence
• Accessibility out of the box

Backplane Implementation

The XG worked on XForms, XHTML, SMIL, RDFa, SVG, ODF (E.g. spreadsheets with live graphics)

Conclusion

In the light of the emerging trend to implement XML vocabularies in Unobtrusive Javascript libraries, we recommend work on standardising the interface between the libraries, so that vocabularies can work together seamlessly, and without prior negotiation.

Final report