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Hands-on Xforms: simplifying the creation and management of XML information. (XForms).

Article Excerpt
Organizations have evolved a variety of systems to deal with the increasing levels of information they must regularly process to remain competitive. Business Process Management (BPM) systems presently take a wide variety of shapes, often including large amounts of ad hoc scripting and one-off implementations of business rules. Such systems tend to be developed incrementally, and pose a significant obstacle to continued development and maintenance.

A World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specification called XForms aims to change this situation. This article compares XForms to ad hoc solutions to produce a real-life application: the creation of XML purchase orders.

Note: The material in this article is adapted with permission from a chapter of the book XForms Essentials, to be published by O'Reilly & Associates in August 2003.

The Problem

Of the several efforts that are under way to define XML vocabularies for business, the most promising seems to be UBL, the Universal Business Language. At the expense of being slightly verbose, the vocabularies defined by UBL do a remarkable job of capturing all of the minor variations that occur in real-world business documents across diverse organizations. For the sample application in my book, I chose a purchase order, since that kind of document is well-understood and demonstrates several features, such as repeating line items, that are customarily difficult to implement. This latest version of this solution is available online at http://dubinko. info/writing/xforms/ubl.

A template UBL purchase order document is shown in Listing 1 (listings can be found at www.sys-con.com/xml/ sourcec.cfm).

The Solution

Any number of technologies could be called upon to implement an application that produces purchase orders based on templates like the one in Listing 1. Prior to XForms, a typical solution would employ HTML forms and...