XForms/Installing and Testing

XForms Client Options

There are several ways to get started using XForms. But we must first understand that running XForms within a web browser has several security-related issues that prevent software from saving to your local hard drive. There are several workarounds for this.

There are several XForms systems that can be used to build XForms. For example:

XSLTForms is a XForms implementation that can run within your browser or on the server. The client-based system run an XSLT transform within your browser.

BetterFORM is a server-side implementation of XForms that comes bundled with a native XML database (eXist-db).

There are JavaScript-based solutions and other plugins as well as web-server solutions available. See the Player Specific Instructions or the wikipedia page on XForms for more details. Note that these XForm solutions usually require you to download a web server and install Java Web Archive Files (War files) in the correct directory or add player-specific code to your examples.

FireFox Plugin

The FireFox plugin has limited support on the Mac and may not be supported in current versions of FireFox.

One of the most common today is Installing XForms in Firefox. This takes only about a minute to install so it is used by many of our students. Most of these exercises have been tested with the Firefox 0.7 extension on both Firefox 1.5 and Firefox 2.0.

Firefox 3.6 plugin: xForms 0.8.7

Firefox 2.0 plugin: FireFox 2.0 for the Mac

XForms Processors

XSLTForms uses XSLT and JavaScript in the browser to transform an XForms into HTML.

betterFORM processes XForms on the server with Java.

Orbeon Forms processes XForms on the server with Java.

All can be used with the eXist Native XML Database.

See also the Wikipedia article on XForms