Is XForms still a standard that is being implemented and developed, or is there an alternative in place or being developed?

Question

XForms was and/or is an XML markup that supports structured form data. It is a standard evolved from XML and was designed to be easily integrated into other current markup l

Answer 1

Writing as the long-time chair of the XForms groups, I don't need to add much more to what Erik has already said about the working group and the specification.

However it is worth saying a little about how it is being used, and some of the advantages, since when you are using a website, you can never tell that it is using XForms.

There is no way to tell when a company is using XForms, so the only ones I know about are when someone in the organisation mentions it to me. Some of the ones I have heard about are:

Several Dutch Government departments, several UK government departments, the USA Dept of Motor Vehicles, the British National Health Service, the BBC, the Dutch weather service, the Dutch land registry, the British insurance industry, EMC, NASA, CMC, US Navy, German shipbuilders, Xerox, Yahoo. The list is very long.

There are some nice stories too. A recent one is from the British National Health Service, which started a project for a health records system:

• It involved 70 people
• It cost £10M.
• The hardware costs alone were £5 per patient.
• It failed.

One single person then created a replacement system using XForms:

• Hardware costs are 1p per patient
• It runs on Raspberry Pi's
• It is now running in 5 NHS hospitals.

There are many other examples of XForms saving huge sums of money.

There are many active implementations, including:

• CM Pro (Netherlands),
• Inventive Designers (Belgium),
• BetterForm* (Germany),
• XSLTForms* (France),
• Jadu (UK),
• Orbeon* (USA),
• Enketo (USA).

XForms is also part of OpenOffice* and LibreOffice*

*=open source

We have a yearly XForms Day in Amsterdam. The next one will be in May. I will be publishing the details on my home page, which you can find by Googling my name.

Steven Pemberton