Orbeon Forms community mailing list

Should we continue with Orbeon?

Classic

List

Threaded

6 messages Options

marckropholler

Should we continue with Orbeon?

Dear Orbeon users,

I was wondering whether there are some people who are having any constructive thoughts on the discussion here whether we should continue with Orbeon or not.

On the positive side, it is a mature product that can really do a lot, there are a lot of examples, documentation and good free support on the forum. I'm sure that if you know it inside out you can do a lot with it quickly.

On the negative side, I've been working with Orbeon for one week now and it takes quite a while to learn all its features and how to use them. I've managed by adapting the examples to get some basic things working, such as validation, using the same model between different page requests and routing the user to different pages depending on the values he or she filled in the form, but I still have basic knowledge of this and there are large parts of Orbeon that I haven't begun, such as calling web services and java integration. It is almost like learning a new language. I am starting to doubt that the time to learn Orbeon is worth the investment. Also other people here have to work with the same code, so they have to now Orbeon as well. For a limited number of forms and web services, we are thinking of using the standard java code and cxf.

Are there any people who are having any thoughts on this?

Best wishes,
Marc

Alistair Miles-2

Re: Should we continue with Orbeon?

Hi Marc,

I don't know if this will help, but for one of our projects we have
recently made the shift from development of web applications in Java
GWT to Orbeon XForms. That's not to say that I don't like GWT, but for
this particular project, where we have a number of relatively complex
forms, and where data is persisted via a set of Atom-based web
services, the move to Orbeon and XForms as dramatically improved our
productivity.

Some of the big wins were the simplicity of declaratively implementing
interaction with web services via the xforms:submission element and
event model (no longer did we need to write web service client code in
Java), and also the relative ease of implementing complex forms with
lots of relevance dependencies, repeatable sections, and validation
rules, all declaratively. Here XForms (and in particular the Orbeon
extensions) have given us a big leg up.

Having said that, you will have to learn XForms. But if you've spent
any time thinking about forms and event-driven application design,
XForms makes a lot of sense.

Hth,

Alistair

On Tue, May 04, 2010 at 12:52:15AM -0700, marckropholler wrote:

>
> Dear Orbeon users,
>
> I was wondering whether there are some people who are having any
> constructive thoughts on the discussion here whether we should continue with
> Orbeon or not.
>
> On the positive side, it is a mature product that can really do a lot, there
> are a lot of examples, documentation and good free support on the forum. I'm
> sure that if you know it inside out you can do a lot with it quickly.
>
> On the negative side, I've been working with Orbeon for one week now and it
> takes quite a while to learn all its features and how to use them. I've
> managed by adapting the examples to get some basic things working, such as
> validation, using the same model between different page requests and routing
> the user to different pages depending on the values he or she filled in the
> form, but I still have basic knowledge of this and there are large parts of
> Orbeon that I haven't begun, such as calling web services and java
> integration. It is almost like learning a new language. I am starting to
> doubt that the time to learn Orbeon is worth the investment. Also other
> people here have to work with the same code, so they have to now Orbeon as
> well. For a limited number of forms and web services, we are thinking of
> using the standard java code and cxf.
>
> Are there any people who are having any thoughts on this?
>
> Best wishes,
> Marc
> --
> View this message in context: http://orbeon-forms-ops-users.24843.n4.nabble.com/Should-we-continue-with-Orbeon-tp2125131p2125131.html
> Sent from the Orbeon Forms (ops-users) mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

>
> --
> You receive this message as a subscriber of the [hidden email] mailing list.
> To unsubscribe: mailto:[hidden email]
> For general help: mailto:[hidden email]?subject=help
> OW2 mailing lists service home page: http://www.ow2.org/wws

--
Alistair Miles
Centre for Genomics and Global Health <http://cggh.org>
The Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics
Roosevelt Drive
Oxford
OX3 7BN
United Kingdom
Web: http://purl.org/net/aliman
Email: [hidden email]
Tel: +44 (0)1865 287669

--
You receive this message as a subscriber of the [hidden email] mailing list.
To unsubscribe: mailto:[hidden email]
For general help: mailto:[hidden email]?subject=help
OW2 mailing lists service home page: http://www.ow2.org/wws

Andrew Bailey

Re: Should we continue with Orbeon?

In reply to this post by marckropholler

Hi,

One of the major problems I see with xforms is that declarative
programing requires a mindshift in how to write programs. While it is
certain that there is a steep learning curve at the start, my opinion
is that to write interactive "web 2.0" forms that run on all platforms
(including linux 64 bit where adobe hasnt released a flash plugin that
works) it is the best platform to date.

Orbeon has the things that you need to write business forms that the
xforms standard misses out.
However, I would like to see the orbeon extensions be standardised ...
xforms 2.0 perhaps.

So Marc, I would advise you to keep learning from the examples, they
have lots of neat things you can do, that would take ages to do with
another technology like javascript directly and get it to run on all
browsers.

Andrew Bailey
Cel - 312 866 95 56
Chat Skype: hazlorealidad

On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 2:52 AM, marckropholler <[hidden email]> wrote:

--
You receive this message as a subscriber of the [hidden email] mailing list.
To unsubscribe: mailto:[hidden email]
For general help: mailto:[hidden email]?subject=help
OW2 mailing lists service home page: http://www.ow2.org/wws

marckropholler

Re: Should we continue with Orbeon?

Dear Alistair and Andrew,

Thank you for your replies, they do help. Good to hear that it dramatically improved performance in a project, and that mindshift thing is probably a good one to make anyway.

Best wishes
Marc

Alistair Miles-2

Re: Re: Should we continue with Orbeon?

FWIW I found working through the tutorial [1] was a great way to get
into xforms and orbeon. Generally speaking, the documentation in the
Orbeon user guide [2] and wiki [3] is of excellent quality, which for
us was a significant factor in deciding to switch. Usually a search of
google with site:orbeon.com will find what you're after, although it
isn't always obvious what to look for (e.g., it took me a few hours to
figure out that "attribute value templates (AVTs)" were the answer to
a particular question I had early on). I'm sure folks on this list
will point you in the right direction if you can't find something.

Cheers,

Alistair

[1] http://www.orbeon.com/orbeon/doc/intro-tutorial
[2] http://www.orbeon.com/orbeon/doc/index
[3] http://wiki.orbeon.com/forms/doc

On Wed, May 05, 2010 at 11:43:31PM -0700, marckropholler wrote:

>
> Dear Alistair and Andrew,
>
> Thank you for your replies, they do help. Good to hear that it dramatically
> improved performance in a project, and that mindshift thing is probably a
> good one to make anyway.
>
> Best wishes
> Marc
> --
> View this message in context: http://orbeon-forms-ops-users.24843.n4.nabble.com/Should-we-continue-with-Orbeon-tp2125131p2132133.html
> Sent from the Orbeon Forms (ops-users) mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

marckropholler

Re: Re: Should we continue with Orbeon?

Dear Alistair,

You're right, the documentation is very good and once you get the basic ideas it is not even that difficult. We're going to continue with it.

Best wishes
Marc