[JDEV] forms

[Peter Saint-Andre]

As I was taking notes at JabberCon, one theme that kept popping into my
mind was the need for strong forms support in Jabber. Just as the World
Wide Web consisted mostly of reading hyperlinked documents (albeit
eventually with some flashy graphics and multimedia stuff) until web
developers figured out how to offer interactive forms and therefore
"weblications" like searching the web and ordering books online, so I
think Jabber will consist mostly of IM (and a few related applications)
until we have Jabber forms that will enable developers to create more
robust "Jablications" like _______ (you fill in the blank :).

I don't have any answers or specific proposals to offer, but I'd certainly
like to get the discussion going. Ryan Eatmon put together a proposed spec
for Jabber forms a number of months ago, and even converted it into JEP
format, but there's been minimal discussion of it and I think that's what
we need to move forward. The JEP can be found here:

http://foundation.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0004.html

More specifically, I'm wondering if there is value in looking at the W3C
spec for XForms. Here are some links of interest for that angle:

http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/2001/09/05/xforms.html
http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/2001/09/26/xforms.html
http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-xforms-20010828/

There are 12 people on the forms-jig mailing list and 1050 people on the
JDEV list. I invite those of you who are interested in building more
advanced data interchange over Jabber (as opposed to simple IM) to join
the forms-jig list so we can kick-start this discussion:

http://mailman.jabber.org/listinfo/forms-jig/

Peter

--
Peter Saint-Andre
email/jabber: stpeter at jabber.org
web: http://www.saint-andre.com/