Jerry S
Clinical workflow and interoperability assessment, planning and implementation
What is your opinion of FormsPlayer, the X-forms development environment?
With regards to developing dynamically configurable UIs where throughput is critical.
Answers (4)
Victor E
Doctoral student at European Organization for Nuclear Research
Best Answers in: Web Development (9), Software Development (1)
I'm not sure I know what you mean by "throughput". How fast users can finish their task? How much data the XForms processor can read and write per second?
From what I remember after evaluating FormsPlayer against other XForms processors two years ago, was that it was non-free, closed source, and IE-only.
After the evaluation mentioned, and the following development and production feedback, I'd recommend Chiba instead. It's open source, free, cross-platform (since it's made with Java), cross-browser (since it outputs HTML), easy to style (with CSS / JavaScript), and has a very responsive and helpful development team.
The only problem I found was that I had speed problems (10 second page loads) when using instance files of 327 kilobytes. There was already a patch in the pipeline by the time I reported this, so it should be fixed by now. Besides, that kind of instance size is way too big to be relevant for most web based projects.
Links:
Clarification added April 8, 2007:
You can contact me if you'd like more details or code.
I'm not associated with the Chiba project.
Jerry,
If throghput is critical, then want to avoid the infrastructure components that you have no direct control over. Your eventual bottleneck with this tool will be the XML processor, over which you'll have zero control.
- Igor
Hi Jerry,
I have followed the XForms development, but am not specifically familiar with FormsPlayer. I do know that they are Windows specific (but claim to be working on ports for other architectures). As for high performance throughput, that would depend more on your backend server processing and not on the front-end display handling provided by FormsPlayer. Unless FormsPlayer is providing some server based mechanisms, your total applicaiton throughput will be determined by the server-side application you've written to receive the data posted from the forms managed by FormsPlayer.
On the front-end, throughput would equate to application responsiveness. This is going to depend entirely on the quality of the XML processing engine in FormsPlayer. If your forms are large and complex, you probably want to do some pilot evaluations to determine if it handles forms of the scale you need with reasonable load and display times.
I know that there are open source XForms implementations available, but I haven't played with them. I would consider looking closely at them if platform independence is at all an issue (since FormsPlayer is still IE only).
I hope this helps. If not, please let me know and I'll dig into it some more.
Regards,
Larry.
This is in an interesting question, and can be seen to be as much about XForms in general, as it is about formsPlayer in particular.
For example, many forms that we see from our customers are extremely large. In and of itself that's not such a big problem, except that they forms invariably load all of the data they will ever need, at the beginning. They also usually have drop-boxes that contain lots of information, and lots of controls that are not needed all of the time (being inside switch/case constructs).
Taken together, this makes for forms that are slow to load, and sometimes, slow to function, regardless of how fast the underlying XML processor is. (And in fact, slow loading is probably more to do with not working around the HTTP restriction on only having two server connections active at a time.)
I've written a <a href="http://internet-apps.blogspot.com/2007/04/dynamic-user-interfaces-and-xforms.html">blog entry that looks at this question</a>, and some of the things that can be done when designing the architecture of an application that uses XForms.
Any comments are of course welcome here or on the post itself.
Regards,
Mark
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Mark Birbeck, formsPlayer
mark.birbeck@x-port.net | +44 (0) 20 7689 9232
http://www.formsPlayer.com | http://internet-apps.blogspot.com
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