Customer Reviews

Xforms Essentials

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The author is a member of the W3C XForms Working Group, so he knows what he is talking about. This guide is a great starting point for getting to grips with XForms whether or not you are already familiar with HTML forms. This is a much better place to start than the XForms spec, which is pretty impenetrable to your average forms author. Micah takes you through the basics, shows you where XForms fits with other W3C standards, and gets you started with authoring. Once you are feeling a bit more confident this book serves as an excellent reference. One of the really nice things about the book is that there isn't too much of it. It gives a good grounding in the subject without any waffle. In the course of my work I have spoken to several others who have similarly found Micahs book to be an essential starting point to XForms, and a solid reference book.

XForms is, very quietly, changing the way that we view the web, putting it on a much more solid XML based footing. While the specification is difficult to comprehend at the best of times, the power of the specification is such that it provides a solid basis on which to build the XML web.

Micah Dubinko's book cuts through a great deal of complexity of the form and illustrates in clear, concise examples how the most critical features are used, elucidates much of the reasoning behind how certain features evolved (a bonus coming from his days helming the XForms specification itself) and otherwise provides a thorough yet easy to understand introduction to what is undoubtably one of the most important specifications to come out of the W3C.

My company is using XForms to build significant portions of our infrastructure upon my guidance, and I hand a copy of this book out to each one of my programmers. If you deal with XML at all, this book should absolutely be part of your library.

Kurt Cagle
Chief Technology Architect
Seattle Book Company
and Author (SVG Programming, XQuery Kickstart, Beginning XML, etc.)

This book is a poor introduction to XForms. In a text that is only slightly larger than a pamphlet, the author attempts to do much more than simply introduce XForms, and the result is that nothing ends up being explained well.

The relatively few pages of the author's own creation are written in a prose so terse that in some places it reads like gibberish, and the rest of the text is a reference that repeats what is available in the W3C XForms and XPath specifications and the XForms for HTML Authors document.

One of the recent IBM acquisitions leads me to believe that the XForms standard will begin to play a larger part in my area of software expertise. To that end, I got a review copy of XForms Essentials by Micah Dubinko in order to try and get a basic understanding of the standard and technology. The book does a pretty good job of that, but is probably more useful for someone who is all ready to dig in and use it.

Contents: Introduction to Web Forms; XForms Building Blocks; XPath in XForms; XML Schema in XForms; The XForms Model; The XForms User Interface; Actions and Events; Submit; Styling XForms; Form Accessibility, Design, and Troubleshooting; Extending XForms; Examining Microsoft InfoPath; The GNU Free Documentation License; Index

Dubinko starts off by examining how HTML forms work, and then transitions into how XForms addresses some of the problems (heavy reliance on scripting, restriction to flat key/value data pairing, etc.). Chapter 2 does a pretty high-level overview of an XForms document and what components do what in the layout. From there, you start to get pretty deep into the different areas that make up the entire XForms family, like XPath and XML Schema. At this point, having a solid footing in XML technology is probably required (or highly suggested), because the terminology gets technical and a fair amount of reference material starts to creep in. If you're actually using XForms in your application development, then you'll be able to use those reference sections to understand and use things like datatypes and computed expressions. I also really liked the appendix section on the comparison between XForms and Microsoft's competing InfoPath implementation. It does a nice job highlighting the major differences in a really short number of pages.

While this might not have been the best "first" XForms book for me to read, it definitely does a good job in covering the information for the right audience. If someone were faced with a software application that used XForms and they needed to support it, I'd definitely suggest getting a copy of this book. The technical nature will help as you get your hands dirty on a daily basis. If you're simply looking for a high-level understanding of XForms, there's a fair amount here that will cause your eyes to glaze over...