XForms

[Henrik Hofmann <He...@creon-it.com>]

Hi,
 
I’m relativly new to Cocoon, and try to evaluate which techniques can be
used to work with cocoon.
 
We’re trying to use the cocoon architecture of 3 layers
(data,content,style) but this seems to be difficult to me when it comes
to forms. 
 
Browsing through the web I found information about XForms, which seem to
be client independent and make use of the same 3 layer architecture. 
 
My Question is, if there’s already a way to use them in Cocoon2. 
 
On the other side I would be interested about any ideas, to use forms in
this architecture in general. 
 
Important to me is that I can lock the Forms functionality in layer 2
and change the style in layer 3, to be sure no matter how the form will
look like it will at least work correctly.
 
bye

Re: XForms

[Tobias Kiesling <to...@web.de>]

Hi Henrik,

I've been working on a similar problem, trying to specify the functionality 
of Forms (more generally of any interactions of the user with a web site) 
indepedently of the specific output medium (html, wml, etc.).

This means that the functionality of a form as it appears in traditional html 
has to be split into two parts:
 - the medium independent part common to all output media, and
 - the medium dependent part

The first of these two has to be included with the data of the page and the 
second has to be added in the transformation step(s) creating the page in the 
specific output medium (Layer 2 and Layer 3 in your three-layer architecture).

Cocoon offers no special support for XForms, as it (XForms) is yet in an 
early development status, however it is possible to just use the XForms 
language for representing Forms in an abstract way and to use XSLT to 
transform this language into any output format like html.

An earlier working draft of XForms specified a rather well-suited language 
for the representation of abstract user interactions, but in the current 
working draft they moved away from the strong separation of the above 
mentioned parts a little, so I think it's not so well-suited any more.

I created a language for this purpose myself. I think it is conceptually 
nice, however it showed to be very difficult (if not practically impossible) 
to transform this language to the specific output media with the help of 
standard XSLT. For this reason I am thinking about an improved version that 
eases the development of XSLT stylesheets for the styling transformations.

I wrote a paper about my experiences with this language, so if you are more 
interested in it, you can find the paper at:
http://www.pms.informatik.uni-muenchen.de/publikationen/fopras/Tobias.Kiesling/fopra_final.ps.gz

Hope this helps a little.

I would be interested to share experiences in this field, so if you have any 
ideas or suggestions feel free to send me a mail about it.

Greetings,
  Tobias


Am Mittwoch, 19. September 2001 12:38 schrieben Sie:
> Hi,
>
> I’m relativly new to Cocoon, and try to evaluate which techniques can be
> used to work with cocoon.
>
> We’re trying to use the cocoon architecture of 3 layers
> (data,content,style) but this seems to be difficult to me when it comes
> to forms.
>
> Browsing through the web I found information about XForms, which seem to
> be client independent and make use of the same 3 layer architecture.
>
> My Question is, if there’s already a way to use them in Cocoon2.
>
> On the other side I would be interested about any ideas, to use forms in
> this architecture in general.
>
> Important to me is that I can lock the Forms functionality in layer 2
> and change the style in layer 3, to be sure no matter how the form will
> look like it will at least work correctly.
>

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