Orbeon Forms 3.6

Orbeon Forms 3.6 Final Released

December 10, 2007.

It is with great pleasure that we are announcing the final release of Orbeon Forms 3.6!

Orbeon Forms is an open source forms solution that handles the complexity of forms typical of the enterprise or government. It is delivered to standard web browsers thanks to XForms and Ajax technology, with no need for client-side software or plugins.

Orbeon Forms allows you to build fully interactive forms with features that include as-you-type validation, optional and repeated sections, always up-to-date error summaries, PDF output, full internationalization, and controls like auto-completion, tabs, dialogs, trees and menus.

Orbeon Forms 3.6 features over 170 improvements since Orbeon Forms 3.5.1, including major improvements in the areas of state handling, XML Schema validation, error handling, deployment within Java applications, and performance. The complete list of changes is available at:

http://www.orbeon.com/ops/doc/home-changes-36

The latest example applications are online at:

http://www.orbeon.com/ops/

You can get Orbeon Forms 3.6 from the download page:

http://www.orbeon.com/forms/download

The Orbeon team hopes you will enjoy this release!

- Erik Bruchez

General Orbeon Forms FAQ

Excerpted from the online FAQ document:

2.1. What is Orbeon Forms?

Orbeon Forms (formerly Orbeon PresentationServer — OPS) is an open source forms solution that handles the complexity of forms typical of the enterprise or government. It is delivered to standard web browsers (including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera) thanks to XForms and Ajax technology, with no need for client-side software or plugins. Orbeon Forms allows you to build fully interactive forms with features that include as-you-type validation, optional and repeated sections, always up-to-date error summaries, PDF output, full internationalization, and controls like auto-completion, tabs, dialogs, trees and menus. Orbeon Forms already supports parts of the XForms 1.1 specification.

Unlike other web application platforms based on Java objects or scripting languages, Orbeon Forms is based on XML documents and XForms. This leads to an architecture perfectly suited for the tasks of capturing, processing, and presenting XML data (in particular form data), and does not require writing any Java, JavaScript or other scripting code at all.

Orbeon Forms is built around a user-friendly Ajax-based XForms engine, which brings W3C XForms to standard browsers, and the XPL engine, a mature, high-performance XML pipeline engine for processing XML data.

2.2. Is Orbeon Forms an XForms Engine?

Orbeon Forms does contain an XForms engine (also known as an XForms processor), which we refer to as the Orbeon Forms XForms engine. It also contains an XML pipeline engine running the XPL pipeline language, an application controller (the Page Flow Controller or PFC), and built-in components to perform XSLT transformations, database access, and more. Needless to say, Orbeon Forms ships with examples and documentation.

You are free to use Orbeon Forms only for its XForms functionality, but you can also leverage more of Orbeon Forms to build your forms-based application.

2.3. Is there any cost associated with using Orbeon Forms?

No, Orbeon Forms is truly open source and free or charge whether your use it to build open source or commercial applications.

You are free to extend the platform, and you are free to build applications on top of the platform as you please. Note however that if you make changes to the existing Orbeon Forms code, you are bound by the terms of the LGPL license, which requires you to redistribute changes to the open source community when you distribute your application.

Orbeon does offer commercial support for Orbeon Forms. See the information about our support plans.

[Announcement source:
http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200712/msg00067.html
http://www.orbeon.com/blog/2007/12/07/orbeon-forms-36-final-released/]

Prepared by Robin Cover for The XML Cover Pages archive. See also: (1) "Great Success of the XForms Evening at the XML 2007 Conference" [blog]; (2) "XML and Forms."

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