What is lightweight?
For me lightweight is: Parsing takes only little resources. Implementation is
easy with a few lines of code. Only necessary functionality.
Not lightweight is: Very complex framework that tries to cover everything.
I’m sure XML needs a few more lines to implement than JSON.
But what really is heavyweight are many standards. Like SOAP and XFORMS.
The JSON world doesn’t have this problem, they don’t have standards like
XForms. (And no alternative)
You don’t need to learn how to use XForms. You need a form, you can start right
on with a language you know (Javasript)
People use other libraries to create forms, like AngularJS, and have a handmade
component for each control.
Actually every developer/company has its own UI-Style, and so they can create
the Framework they need.
Often it’s only small things that XForms can’t do. Like working with
Websockets. Interactive status for an order form.
With XForms the standard tells you how to work. With that you always have
limitations.
I accepted these limitations with the benefit that I am working with a standard.
That “should” mean: sustainability, better support and documentation, many
different applications you can run your code on.
Unfortunately the reality is, that people are talking about dead standards,
just when I am happy with them.
I must say it took a while until I got used to XForms. For me that was
investing lots of time.
I used Betterform, which is the opposite of lightweight. But it is cool. The
disadvantage is: When you work with the XForms language,
It’s a big step adding new components and scripts. This is much easier when you
build up your UI from scratch.
That is the problem with standards that cover almost everything. You get used
to it, and try to do everything with the standard.
Otherwise you can’t port it to another platform.
BTW. Just because somebody of W3C says it’s dead, it doesn’t need to be dead or
a failure. But except of the XML-Community, nobody knows XForms.
I like XForms and I hope that it’s not dead!
Manuel
Ps.: When tools can do less, you need to learn less. That why people use JSON ☺
From: Ihe Onwuka [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Mittwoch, 15. Oktober 2014 21:48
To: Paul Vanderveen
Cc: Alain Couthures; Forms WG; [email protected];
[email protected]
Subject: Re: [Xsltforms-support] Is XForms a failure to learn from?
On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 7:23 PM, Paul Vanderveen
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Interesting thread
We have integrated XForms into our product, and I would never say that XForms
is a failure. I do, however, think that for largely non-technical reasons the
world has decided to go in other directions. The work Alain’s done with
XSLTForms is phenomenal, but XML in general is being hit hard in favor of
lighter weight protocols.
Except that they are generally not lighter weight but people are being taken in
by the myth.
I think XSLT is safe in that there is no real competitor for transforming XML
documents. XQuery is questionable as a transformation technology (IMHO), but
it is still the best way to query an XML database full of XML content. But
even large XML database proponents like MarkLogic are supporting JSON as well
as XML these days.
Probably because they have smarter people working for them than the NOSql
vendors who pretend that XML doesn't exist.
At TerraXML we have recently decided to adopt AngularJS for our new front end
work, and the more I learn about it the more I see just how many similarities
it has with XForms. The model may be JSON instead of XML, but it is uncanny
how it almost has a feature to feature match with XForms. Even some of the
struggles we’ve had with XForms also come across when building an AngularJS
forms (I call it trial and error programming). XForms was on the right
track, it just didn’t get critical mass. It needed somebody like Google to
jump behind it and that didn’t happen. They jumped behind AngularJS instead.
I don’t know what the future is for XForms, but our current plan is to support
both XForms and HTML5/AngularJS for a time, but we will start migrate over to
doing new forms using AngularJS.
The mass have repeatedly proved their ability to congregate around and prop up
bad ideas. JSON in a form... that somebody made it work doesn't mean that it's
a good idea.
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