The Ubiquity XForms processor allows developers to use XForms markup to create interactive web applications. Ubiquity XForms adds new APIs to a number of popular Ajax libraries, making XForms processing available in standard browsers, without the need for a download.

The Ubiquity XForms project was jointly initiated by IBM(R) Corporation and webBackplane.

THE UBIQUITY XFORMS PROJECT HAS NOW BEEN INCORPORATED INTO THE WEB "BACKPLANE" OPEN SOURCE PROJECT. SINCE UBIQUITY XFORMS HAS BEEN SUBSUMED BY THE WEB BACKPLANE PROJECT, THOSE INTERESTED IN UBIQUITY XFORMS ARE NOW ADVISED TO GO HERE.

Goals

The technical goal is to provide an XForms implementation for each of the popular web browsers without needing a plugin.

Our goal within the world wide web community is to lead the web to its full potential by showing that web browsers are no obstacle to the delivery of standards-based open web client technologies.

Benefits

XForms is a powerful language for building richly interactive data processing web applications that are independent of any particular platform and easily connected to a variety of presentational user interfaces. XForms enables web developers to quickly create useful applications that are easy to maintain. And by making the Ubiquity XForms processor available on a number of different Ajax libraries, authors can use XForms to protect their coding investment by creating Ajax applications that are independent of any particular Ajax library.

High-Level Roadmap

In the near term, the team is seeking to achieve the highest level of conformance to the XForms 1.1 test suite under IE7 and FF3 browsers. Then, our attention will turn to the Safari browser, and we are also interested in contributors for other popular browser platforms.

This project will also provide an implementation of the new XForms for HTML specification.

The library was initially developed to work with the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library, an open source Ajax library. Other libraries such as Dojo will also be supported as the code moves forward, allowing authors to use XForms with their favourite Ajax library.

Getting involved

If you're planning to use Ubiquity XForms in a web-based application, then you'll want to join the Ubiquity XForms Developer Group. This is a useful place to ask questions, keep up-to-date on releases, and make suggestions for future versions.

The Ubiquity XForms Contributor Group is for those contributing to the Ubiquity XForms core code. As detailed in the Instructions for Code Contribution, a contributor must first submit a license agreement to the contributor group. After that, a contributor may provide contributions via diff patches or request SVN commit access.