I used XMLforms for my last one and was reasonably happy. But what about Woody? or Precept? or JXForms?
Help Need advice. Are these new (Woody, JXForms) worth the extra headache of alpha software?
Do not want to start a war.
Just a quick note on Woody before heading off for the weekend:
Woody came into existence upon my persistent nagging of Bruno to come up with something less programmatic as XMLForms (take this as a neutral note and largely IMHO), also with regards to the messy Transformer code at that time. Woody does forms, and nothing more than that ATM. We hope it does a good job at that, and will be adding widgets when the need arises:
We are currently implementing Woody for a customer of ours, which has a huge EJB backend app to which we are going to talk through XML/HTTP, according more or less the same integration principles existing in xReporter (ReST style): back-end is a Phoenix-based query server and front-end is Cocoon. No sessions, no fancy presentation tier state management, all explicit bookmarkable URIs and all good stuff Roy Fielding noted down & Paul Prescod advocated.
The binding framework for that customer project will map between the Woody form instance model and XML, and it is noted in our contract that we can contribute any part of that framework back to Cocoon (as noted on our website, we give price reductions for customers willing to adopt this scheme). It will be upon our own judgement whether parts are sufficiently generic enough to do so.
Woody is largely orthogonal to the flow approach, and given sufficient time, energy, fun and funding, we might be contributing glue between both, and work on other binding frameworks (think: databases).
Woody is also our lunchtime sandwich caterer, but that's largely off-topic, I guess. The guy doesn't even know his shop name is used in org.apache... package names. ;-D
Hope this helps,
</Steven> -- Steven Noels http://outerthought.org/ Outerthought - Open Source, Java & XML Competence Support Center Read my weblog at http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/ stevenn at outerthought.org stevenn at apache.org
