In discussion with colleagues around this topic, the question of
controlled vocabularies has been prominent. We're looking to move away
from list instances that are packed into the XForm at render time to
lists that are exposed from other services through REST interfaces,
which can be dynamically coupled into a form.
On the other hand, 4 seconds is really not terribly long. {grin}
---
A. Soroka
Digital Research and Scholarship R & D
the University of Virginia Library
On Nov 13, 2009, at 12:45 PM, Ford, Kevin wrote:
We've been using Orbeon forms for about a year now for cataloging
our digital collections. We use Fedora Commons, so using the XML as
input and outputting to XML seemed a no brainer. It has worked very
nicely for editing VRA Core4 records. But, instead of doing anything
terribly fancy with Orbeon, we simply use the little sandbox
application that comes with Orbeon (there's an online demo [1]).
The URL to the XForm is part of the query string. This solution has
greatly reduced our time investment in making Orbeon part of our
workflow and, more importantly, getting Orbeon to work for us. All
that being said, Ethan's sharp looking EAD editor makes me jealous
that we haven't created our own custom editor.
As for Orbeon's performance, once we worked out some quirks, we've
been quite happy with Orbeon. Orbeon hosts a useful performance and
tuning page [2]. We also learned that it is helpful to stop the
Orbeon app and restart it about once every two weeks as performance
can become progressively slower. It seems to need a little reboot.
In any event, a typical XForm for us is about 200k, with a number of
authority lists, one of which includes nearly 1500 items. Orbeon
loads and renders the XForm fairly quickly (less than 4 seconds) and
editing performance hasn't been an issue either, which is great
considering that a 1500-item-subject-authority drop down list is
created for each subject being added to a record.
Moving such a large XForm to a server-based solution was necessary.
Our XForm cataloging application, which began with a simple DC
record and focused on producing a viable XForm, initially used the
Mozilla XForm add-on [3]. The Firefox add-on, which of course runs
on the client, easily scaled for a VRA Core4 record, but it couldn't
handle a burgeoning subject authority file. Hence the need for an
alternative solution, quick.
-Kevin
[1] http://www.orbeon.com/ops/xforms-sandbox/
[2] http://wiki.orbeon.com/forms/doc/developer-guide/performance-
tuning
[3] http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xforms/
--
Kevin Ford
Library Digital Collections
Columbia College Chicago
-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of Andrew Ashton
Sent: Friday, November 13, 2009 8:37 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] XForms EAD editor sandbox available
Nice job, Ethan. This looks really cool.
We have an Orbeon-based MODS editor, but I have found Orbeon to be a
bit
tough to develop/maintain and more heavyweight than we really need.
We're
considering more Xforms implementations, but I would love to find a
more
lightweight Xforms application. Does anyone have any recommendations?
The only one I know of is XSLTForms (http://www.agencexml.com/xsltforms
) but
I haven't messed with it yet.
-Andy
On 11/13/09 9:13 AM, "Eric Hellman" <[email protected]> wrote:
XForms and Orbeon are very interesting tools for developing metadata
management tools.
The ONIX developers have used this stack to produce an interface
for ONIX-PL
called OPLE that people should try out.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/pals3/onixeditor.aspx
Questions about Orbeon relate to performance and integrability, but
I think
it's an impressive use of XForms nonetheless.
- Eric
On Nov 12, 2009, at 1:30 PM, Ethan Gruber wrote:
Hello all,
Over the past few months I have been working on and off on a
research
project to develop a XForms, web-based editor for EAD finding aids
that runs
within the Orbeon tomcat application. While still in a very early
alpha
stage (I have probably put only 60-80 hours of work into it thus
far), I
think that it's ready for a general demonstration to solicit
opinions,
criticism, etc. from librarians, and technical staff.
Background:
For those not familiar with XForms, it is a W3C standard for
creating
next-generation forms. It is powerful and can allow you to create
XML in
the way that it is intended to be created, without limits to
repeatability,
complex hierarchies, or mixed content. Orbeon adds a level on top
of that,
taking care of all the ajax calls, serialization, CRUD operations,
and a
variety of widgets that allow nice features like tabs and
autocomplete/autosuggest that can be bound to authority lists and
controlled
access terms. By default, Orbeon reads and writes data from and
to an eXist
database that comes packaged with it, but you can have it
serialize the XML
to disk or have it interact with any REST interface such as Fedora.
Goals:
Ultimately, I wish to create a system of forms that can open any EAD
2002-compliant XML file without any data loss or XML transformation
whatsoever. I think that this is the shortcoming of systems such
as Archon
and Archivists' Toolkit. I want to integrate authority lists that
can be
integrated into certain fields with autosuggest (such as corporate
names,
people, and subjects). If there is demand, I can build a public
interface
for viewing the entire EAD collection, complete with solr for
faceted browse
and search, but this is secondary to producing a form that people
with some
basic archiving knowledge and EAD background can use to easily and
effectively create finding aids. A public interface is the easy
part, in
any case. It wouldn't take more than a week or two to build
something
fairly nice and robust.
Here is the link: http://beta.scholarslab.org:9080/cocoon/eaditor/
I should stress that the application is *not complete.* I am
using cocoon
for providing a list of EAD content in the system. I will remove
that
application eventually and utilize Orbeon's internal pipelining
features to
achieve the same objective. I haven't delved too deeply into
Orbeon's
pipelines yet.
Here are some things to note:
1. If you click on a link to open the main part of the guide or
any of its
components, you have to click the "Load" link on the top of the
form. Forms
aren't being loaded on page load yet.
2. Elements that accept mixed content per the EAD 2002 schema (e.g.
paragraphs) only accept PCDATA. I haven't worked on mixed content
yet; it
is by far the most challenging aspect of the project.
3. I only have a few C-level elements available to add.
4. Not all did elements are available yet.
5. A lot of the generic attributes, like type and label, are not
available
for editing yet. This may be the type of thing that is best
customized per
institution relative to their own best practices. I don't want
more input
fields than necessary right now.
6. The only thing you can add into the archdesc right now is the
<dsc>.
Once I finish all of the c-level elements, I can just put some
xi:includes
into the archdesc XForm file to show them in the archdesc level.
I think those are the major issues for now. As I stated earlier,
this is
sort of a pre-alpha. The project is open source and available
(through svn)
to anyone who wants it. http://code.google.com/p/eaditor/ . I
have put
together an easy package to get the application up and running
without
difficulty. All you have to do is unzip the download, go into the
apache
tomcat folder and execute the startup script. This assumes you
have nothing
running on port 8080 already.
Download page: http://code.google.com/p/eaditor/downloads/list
Wiki instructions:
http://code.google.com/p/eaditor/wiki/QuickstartInstallation?ts=1257887453&up
dated=QuickstartInstallation
Comments, questions, criticism welcome. The editor is a sandbox.
Feel free
to experiment.
Ethan Gruber
University of Virginia Library
Eric Hellman
President, Gluejar, Inc.
41 Watchung Plaza, #132
Montclair, NJ 07042
USA
[email protected]
http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/
