Today's Paper: Using XForms to Simplify Web Programming

An XForms-based programming model for web applications, HopiXForms (HX), is presented.
It allows multi-targetting of applications.
An XForms processor is essentially a virtual machine that interprets a well-defined, declarative specification language for forms.

Richard Cardone, Danny Soroker, Alpana Tiwari, Using XForms to Simplify Web Programming, In Proc. of WWW 2005, Chiba, Japan, May10-14, 2005.

A pdf file is available from:
http://www2005.org/cdrom/docs/p215.pdf

Title:
Using XForms to Simplify Web Programming
Abstract:
The difficulty of developing and deploying commercial web
applications increases as the number of technologies they use
increases and as the interactions between these technologies
become more complex. This paper describes a way to avoid this
increasing complexity by re-examining the basic requirements of
web applications. Our approach is to first separate client concerns
from server concerns, and then to reduce the interaction between
client and server to its most elemental: parameter passing. We
define a simplified programming model for form-based web
applications and we use XForms and a subset of J2EE as enabling
technologies. We describe our implementation of an MVC-based
application builder for this model, which automatically generates
the code needed to marshal input and output data between clients
and servers. This marshalling uses type checking and other forms
of validation on both clients and servers. We also show how our
programming model and application builder support the
customization of web applications for different execution targets,
including, for example, different client devices.