The Pure Declarative Approach: XForms in Real Estate Forms Case Study

Several developers in Minnesota have been building a prototype of a property tax real estate forms project using pure declarative technologies. We use almost no Java or JavaScript and use mostly on XML Schemas to capture requirements, XML transforms to transform requirements into XForms, native XML databases to store the data (we are using eXist), Schematron to store business rule checks, and XQuery for manipulation and reporting of XML datasets.

The key is to empower a business unit to maintain their own applications without IT involvement. This can be done if the specification are captured and changed graphically and the declarative languages that store the requirements small in scope.

This makes building GUIs and transformation tasks easier.

BIO: Dan McCreary is a semantic web evangelist and metadata consultant. He has recently authored articles for the Semantic Technology conference, DevX and IBM. He maintains a Wikibook collection of XForms examples and is interested in business unit empowerment through declarative systems.