[kukeltje]

What I used them for in the past was designing forms that have a fairly complex structure. Car damage reports, the related insurance claim, the damage assesment etc...

But from 'normal life' it can best be compared to tax forms where you have things like:
- conditionally relevant (visible) items: e.g. did you donate more than x amount to charity, if so fill out to
- conditionally required items: if you have more than 3 children, fill this in, otherwise it is optional
- repeating items (e.g. 0 or more times) (like the number of children)
- spread things over tabs
- show on a tab if there are input fields on that specific tab that need attention (e.g. are invalid, or not filled in yet when required)

etc...
you can all do this declaratively and it results, which is the nice thing, in a xml document that conforms to the xsd on which the form is based

This technology is also used in healthcare (https://xmlprocess.projects.openhealthtools.org/) , document management systems (Alfresco) and jBPM is also considering using it

For screenshots it is rather difficult to show something since the XForms engine (at least Chiba (which would be a nice addition to the JBoss portfolio)) renders everything as html for you

The chiba examples/demo is currently offline, but the orbeon ones are there (but their server is not that responsive)

Controls example: http://www.orbeon.com/ops/xforms-controls/
More Complex form: http://www.orbeon.com/ops/forms/ (select on and choos edit above or start a new one)

What the plugin will do is support editing/creating these kinds of forms in a way you desing e.g. pages with richfaces components nothing more nothing less, but very important and missing at the moment

[kukeltje]

http://planetjbpm.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/xforms-editor-with-jboss-vpe-and-some-jbpm/

shows a screenshot, but at the same time shows you almost nothing since it just results in some visible stuff

[sdzmitrovich]

kukeltje, the vpe rests on xulrunner . theoretically there is capability to hook mozilla extensions ( I have in view Mozilla XForms ) on the vpe. But I have never done it :)

[kukeltje]

Yes, I know and thought about that to. It initially sounds interesting, but
- Not sure if it is still possible then to interact with the elements e.g. for validation, codecompletion etc...
- Displaying XForms for chiba is converting the form to html (with xslt) so it is not native xforms. Styling with css is different then compared to native xforms so that would require effort then
- With the (fairly) limited effort that was put into this now, it is interesting to be independent of a mozilla plugin
- I personally would not have the knowledge to try to do this

But if you have a hint/tip I might give it a try

[sdzmitrovich]

I don't know anything about it now. But I have become interested it. I will try to check if it is possible in the near future.

[maxandersen]

kukeltje - just ping me (email) if you want somewhere to commit this and ill give you access.