Progeny Systems Corporation is a defense contractor focused on hardware and software applications. For more information visit Progeny Systems Corporation.

FormFaces is a software system from Progeny Systems Corporation that provides support for device independent interaction management technology.

The answer depends on your perspective. For executives, XForms is an open standard that encourages a style of forms-based data entry that reduces the total cost of ownership of an e-commerce system.

For technical people, XForms is a new standard for forms based data entry that improves upon HTML forms. To quote from the standard, XForms has several benefits:

XForms has striven to improve authoring, reuse, internationalization, accessibility, usability, and device independence. Here is a summary of the primary benefits of using XForms:

Strong typing

Submitted data is strongly typed and can be checked using off-the-shelf tools. This speeds up form filling since it reduces the need for round trips to the server for validation.

XML submission

This obviates the need for custom server-side logic to marshal the submitted data to the application back-end. The received XML instance document can be directly validated and processed by the application back-end.

Existing schema re-use

This obviates duplication, and ensures that updating the validation rules as a result of a change in the underlying business logic does not require re-authoring validation constraints within the XForms application.

External schema augmentation

This enables the XForms author to go beyond the basic set of constraints available from the back-end. Providing such additional constraints as part of the XForms Model enhances the overall usability of the resulting Web application.

Internationalization

Using XML 1.0 for instance data ensures that the submitted data is internationalization ready.

Enhanced accessibility

XForms separates content and presentation. User interface controls encapsulate all relevant metadata such as labels, thereby enhancing accessibility of the application when using different modalities. XForms user interface controls are generic and suited for device-independence.

Multiple device support

The high-level nature of the user interface controls, and the consequent intent-based authoring of the user interface make it possible to re-target the user interaction to different devices.

Less use of scripting

By defining XML-based declarative event handlers that cover common use cases, the majority of XForms documents can be statically analyzed, reducing the need for imperative scripts for event handlers.

Here are the primary benefits:

XForms improves the user experience

XForms has been designed to allow much to be checked by the browser, such as types of fields being filled in, that a particular field is required, or that one date is later than another. This reduces the need for round trips to the server or for extensive script-based solutions, and improves the user experience by giving immediate feedback to what is being filled in.

It is XML, and it can submit XML

XForms is properly integrated into XML: it is in XML, the data it collects in the form is XML, it can load external XML documents as initial data, and can submit the results as XML. By including the user in the XML pipeline, it at last means you can have end-to-end XML, right up to the user's desktop.

It combines existing XML technologies

Rather than reinventing the wheel, XForms uses a number of existing XML technologies, such as XPath for addressing and calculating values, and XML Schema for defining data types. This has a dual benefit: ease of learning for people who already know these technologies, and the ability for implementors to use off-the-shelf components to build their systems.

It is device independent

The same form can be delivered without change to a traditional browser, a PDA, a mobile phone, a voice browser, and even some more exotic emerging clients such as an Instant Messenger. This greatly eases providing forms to a wide audience, since forms only need to be authored once.

It is easier to author complicated forms

Because XForms uses declarative markup to declare properties of values, and to build relationships between values, it is much easier for the author to create complicated, adaptive, forms, without having to resort to scripting.

It is internationalized

Because the data submitted is XML, it is properly internationalized.

It is accessible

XForms has been designed so that it will work equally well with accessible technologies (for instance for blind users) as with traditional visual browsers.

XForms can do everything that HTML Forms can do, and then some. In particular XForms lets you:

• Check data values while the user is typing them in.
• Indicate that certain fields are required, and that the form cannot be submitted without them.
• Submit forms data as XML.
• Integrate with Web services, for instance by using SOAP and XML RPC.
• Submit the same form to different servers (for instance a search string to different search engines).
• Save and restore values to and from a file.
• Use the result of a submit as input to a further form.
• Get the initial data for a form from an external document.
• Calculate submitted values from other values.
• Constrain values in certain ways, such as requiring them to be in a certain range.
• Build 'shopping basket' and 'wizard' style forms without needing to resort to scripting.

We think so. For example, the British Government's e-government interoperability framework current guidance is to use the "XForms 1.0 standards as defined by W3C". This is a product of an initiative to make all British government services available online by 2005. The initiative is an integral part of local government modernization, involving 482 local government institutions.

XForms 1.0 is a standard of the World Wide Web Consortium. The standard is in the candidate recommendation phase.

Several standards are used by XForms: XML, XHTML, XML Schema, XML Events, and XPath.

For an easy introduction, try the tutorial that comes with our evaluation copy. The XForms specification starts with several very easy to understand examples.