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Orbeon Forms FAQ

Contents

  1. 1 General Orbeon Forms FAQ
    1. 1.1 What is Orbeon Forms?
    2. 1.2 Is Orbeon Forms an XForms Engine?
    3. 1.3 Is there any cost associated with using Orbeon Forms?

General Orbeon Forms FAQ

What is Orbeon Forms?

Orbeon Forms is an open source, standard-based web forms solution, which includes Form Builder, a WYSIWYG browser-based authoring tool, and Form Runner, a runtime environment which facilitates the deployment and integration of a large number of complex forms. Orbeon Forms implements different technologies, such as XForms and Ajax, with no need for client-side software or plug-ins.

Orbeon Forms is built around a user-friendly Ajax-based XForms engine, which brings W3C XForms to standard browsers, and the XPL engine, a mature, high-performance XML pipeline engine for processing XML data. On top of the XForms engine, Orbeon Forms includes Form Runner (a runtime environment for forms) and Form Builder (a web-based form builder). For more information, visit:

Unlike other web application platforms based on Java objects or scripting languages, Orbeon Forms is based on XML documents and XForms. This leads to an architecture perfectly suited for the tasks of capturing, processing, and presenting XML data (in particular form data), and does not require writing any Java, JavaScript or other scripting code at all.

Is Orbeon Forms an XForms Engine?

Orbeon Forms does contain an XForms engine (also known as an XForms processor), which we refer to as the Orbeon Forms XForms engine. It also contains an XML pipeline engine running the XPL pipeline language, an application controller (the Page Flow Controller or PFC), and built-in components to perform XSLT transformations, database access, and more. Needless to say, Orbeon Forms ships with examples and documentation.

You are free to use Orbeon Forms only for its XForms functionality, but you can also leverage more of Orbeon Forms to build your forms-based application.

Is there any cost associated with using Orbeon Forms?

No, Orbeon Forms is truly open source and free or charge whether your use it to build open source or commercial applications.

You are free to extend the platform, and you are free to build applications on top of the platform as you please. Note however that if you make changes to the existing Orbeon Forms code, you are bound by the terms of the LGPL license, which requires you to redistribute changes to the open source community when you distribute your application.

Orbeon does offer commercial support for Orbeon Forms. See the information about our support plans.