The use of forms on the web is so commonplace that most user interactions involve some type of form. XForms--a combination of XML and forms--offers a powerful alternative to HTML-based forms. By providing excellent XML integration, including XML Schema, XForms allows developers to create flexible, web-based user-input forms for a wide variety of platforms, including desktop computers, handhelds, information appliances, and more. XForms Essentials is an introduction and practical guide to the new XForms specification. Written by Micah Dubinko, a member of the W3C XForms working group and an editor of the specification, the book explains the how and why of XForms, showing readers how to take advantage of them without having to write their own code. You'll learn how to integrate XForms with both HTML and XML vocabularies, and how XForms can simplify the connection between client-based user input and server-based processing. XForms Essentials begins with a general introduction to web forms, including information on history and basic construction of forms. The second part of the book serves as a reference manual to the XForms specification. The third section offers additional hints, guidelines, and techniques for working with XForms. Topics covered in the book include:

• creating XForms files in a text or XML editor

• converting existing forms (electronic or paper) to XForms

• collecting XML data from users in a user-friendly way

• reducing the amount of JavaScript needed within browser interfaces

• increasing the security and reliability of your current forms system by combining client-side and server-side checks into a common code base

• creating interactive websites using the latest standard technology

XForms Essentials focuses on the practical application of XForms technology. If you work with forms, HTML, or XML information, XForms Essentials will provide you with a much simpler route to more sophisticated interactions with users.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 4 Ratings

Essential XForms read - 2003-12-01
Reviewer Rating:
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 Micah's book to be an essential starting point to XForms, and a solid reference book.

Read the W3C documents instead. - 2004-12-12
Reviewer Rating:
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.

Superb Book - 2004-03-03
Reviewer Rating:
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.)

A good choice if you're ready to dive into XForms... - 2005-09-03
Reviewer Rating:
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...

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