Seeing is Believing: Intuitive Visual XForms Design

Although the goal of any form is to collect the data that drives back-end transactions, the sophistication of the business processes that we would like to drive with forms has risen dramatically over the years. For example, whereas 10 years ago a form may have asked half a dozen questions, it is not uncommon for today’s forms to ask half a dozen pages of questions.

We will demonstrate that XForms can offer an order of magnitude simplification to the design and development of business applications.

XForms allows data to be collected for any schema, and it provides a vehicle for expressing the dynamic user interactions needed for the data fill experience. This presentation will start with a blank form and a data architect’s XML schema for a sample application, and work from there to show:

1. Drag-and-drop of various data types corresponding to different types of UI controls, including dates, selection lists, groups of UI controls and even tables of repeated controls.
2. Wizard-based generation of dynamic behavioral aspects of forms, including data-driven hiding/showing of groups of controls, table add row and delete row controls, and intelligent table row calculations and column summations.

Everything about XForms, including the event-based imperative scripts for add row and delete row buttons, is expressed with declarative markup patterns that can result in an intuitive and efficient design experience. The business implications for the forms industry include faster application development and time to market, more competitive RFP responses, reduced cost of maintenance and support, and increased end-user satisfaction leading to higher customer return rate.

BIO: IBM Lotus Forms and Next Generation Web Applications

John Boyer is a Senior Technical Staff Member for IBM Lotus Forms. He has co-authored and edited numerous W3C standards and is currently Chair of the W3C Forms Working Group. In 2001, John earned a Ph.D. in computer science, and he has published numerous journal, conference and professional papers on topics ranging from algorithmics to computer security to XML-related technologies. Website