High-level

• Form Builder
• what it does: provide a web-based tool to create forms
  
• benefits:
• don't hand-code your forms by hand
• create and deploy forms in a matter of minutes
• learn more: Orbeon Form Builder
  
• Form Runner
• what it does: provide a runtime for forms-oriented user interfaces and forms processing
  
• benefits: handles of the box a wealth of basic form-related features
  
• learn more: Orbeon Form Runner
  
• XForms 1.1 form processor
• what it does: implement most of the XForms 1.1 W3C recommendation
  
• benefits:
• the best standard technology out there to describe forms and process form data
  
• leverages the brain power of years of careful crafting by the XForms Working Group at W3C
• documentation, tutorials, how-to guides are available outside Orbeon
• learn more: Orbeon Forms
• Open source
• what it does: make everything accessible and modifiable in source code form
  
• benefit: TODO

Technical

• Web-based (in a clean way)
  
• what it does: use the HTML/CSS/JavaScript stack of mainstream web browsers
  
• benefits:
• no need for plugins, all mainstream browsers are supported out of the box
• accessibility supported through standard screen readers
• customization easy for millions of web developers
  
• Declarative orientation
• what it does: focus on writing what to do rather than exactly how
  
• benefit: TODO
  
• Components
• what it does: provide reusable components out of the box, and allow you to write your own
  
• benefit: TODO
  
• State keeping
  
• what it does: keep the state of your page on the client and on the server
• benefit: TODO
• Browser back/forward buttons support
• what it does: restore the page's state as you saw it last when doing a browser back/forward
• benefit: the user is not confused (as is often the case with JavaScript-based pages) and can keep working with the page as if he had never left it
• Session heartbeat
• what it does: keep the server session alive while the user hasn't left the page
• benefit: prevents unexpected and frustrating session expiration
• Cachable versioned UI resources
• what it does: automatically version UI resources (JavaScript, CSS, etc.) and makes them aggressively cacheable
• benefit: makes access to pages faster after they have been loaded once
• Cross-browser compatibility
• what it does: Orbeon Forms tests its JavaScript with all the major browsers
  
• benefit: you have to worry less about browser compatibility
• No need to write JavaScript code
• what it does: with Orbeon Forms, you usually don't write your own JavaScript (although you can)
  
• benefit: less frustration with JavaScript tricks and browser compatibility
• Noscript mode
  
• what it does: produce a JavaScript -free version of your pages
  
• benefit: write your pages once and produce at the same time a dynamic, JavaScript version and a script-free and more accessible version
• Java integration
• what it does: works in standard Java servlet containers and integrate with existing Java applications and portals
  
• benefits:
• use one of many Java deployment options, free or commercial
• easily access existing Java code