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Open source Eclipse/SWT XForms engine released

URL: Eric Barroca's blog entry

At 8:16 AM on Feb 14, 2006, Stefane Fermigier wrote:

Nuxeo , a french open source ISV specialised in Enterprise Content Management, has just published the code for an XForms engine for SWT and Eclipse .

This engine will be used in the Apogee project recently submitted as a proposal to the Eclipse Foundation. Apogee aims at building a framework to create ECM-oriented desktop applications, independent from vendor or technologies. This framework could be used to create applications that will be integrated with Documentum , Interwoven , Nuxeo CPS or any ECM platform.

As Eric Barroca , project manager for Apogee, wrote in his blog:

"The Nuxeo XForms engine allows to :

• Generate Eclipse/SWT forms from a XForms document
• Dynamically validate inputs against an XML Schema without generating an XML document (yes, it's dynamic XSD validation for Eclipse/SWT forms )
• For developers, introspect and test their XForms document (through a dedicated editor)

For us, this new plugin opens new perspectives for Rich Client applications : all user interface forms can be dynamically defined by the server. It's another step in unifying web interfaces and rich client applications... one form to design to create the UI in the browser and in the rich client application. One more step for the Web and Desktop convergence!

The XForms engine is generating Eclipse/SWT Forms from an XHTML/XForms document and an optional XML Schema and CSS stylesheet. This first release supports only a subset of the XForms standard is supported for now (more feature will be added in future), but still, it's really usable and useful for many needs.

The XML Schema is used for automatically validation of the generated forms. You can find more details about XML Schema support are in XML Schema Support section.

The stylesheet defines the form layout for the SWT rendering."

The code for the XForms engine is available in Nuxeo's SVN repository: http://svn.nuxeo.org/pub/Apogee/src/ (in the org.nuxeo.xforms.core, org.nuxeo.xforms.ui and org.nuxeo.xforms.ui.editors modules), and also available via a Trac project management interface.

There is also some documentation available.

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