(April 23, 2003) - The possibilities of XForms, an emerging W3C standard (W3C Candidate Recommendation), are explored in IBM alphaWork's new XML Forms Package. This release allows developers to deploy XForms applications using existing J2EE-based server technologies and simple Web browser-based technologies. It does not require special viewers for XForms applications and it provides a quick and easy way for current Web programmers to begin using XForms.

Providing an early prototype of an important XML standard, the XForms Package will help developers improve user experience by taking advantage of client-side data validation, the ability to update data without redrawing the associated page, and by a rich set of end-user interaction techniques. The XML Forms Package allows developers to deploy XForms applications using the Java XForms compiler. It includes an Internet Explorer process control with several useful extensions including local persistence, UI control extensions, and Web Services integration.

The XML Forms Package toolkit consists of a data model component and a client component.

The data model component provides a set of Java APIs for creating, accessing, and modifying XForms data models. It allows JSP programmers to take advantage of XForms model constraints and validation without leaving their familiar programming environment and tools. This package includes a JSP tag library that provides a set of tags for use inside JSPs. The tag library interfaces with the XForms data model component APIs, providing JSP authors a means of accessing these APIs from within their JSPs.

The client component includes two technologies: An XForms processor control and a Java XForms compiler. The XForms processor control implements the XForms processing model, as defined by the W3C XForms 1.0 Candidate Recommendation, on Internet Explorer. Using the XForms processor control, developers can deploy XHTML documents that use the XForms XML namespace to Internet Explorer. This control implements a mimetype handler for XForms. Documents served with the text/xforms mimetype are processed by this control. The mimetype handler compiles XHTML into HTML with embedded XML, JavaScript, and DOM access, all of which are used to implement the XForms processing model.

The Java XForms compiler provides a Java-based interface for compiling XHTML with XForms into HTML. Like the XForms processor control, the HTML produced includes JavaScript, XML, and DOM access for implementing the XForms processing model. Unlike the XForms processor control, HTML output from the Java XForms compiler can be used with Internet Explorer 5.5+, Netscape 7+, and Mozilla 1.0+. The Servlet examples demonstrate dynamic compilation of XHTML+XForms documents. The Java XForms compiler can also be used at design time to generate static HTML content that implements the XForms processing model for a specified XHTML+XForms document. For more information, see the IBM alphaWorks site.