Determining the behaviour of an application at run-time using parameters is a well-established practice. But whilst it's possible with command-line and server-side applications, the scope for passing information to client-side internet applications is limited. With the growth in internet-facing desktop applications, widgets and gadgets, there is a need to pass parameters directly to the application, rather than via a server, and this post looks at how that might be achieved.
The Ubiquity library provides a range of open source components--from Ajax libraries to browser extensions--that work together to deliver a fresh approach to web application building.
Something which was part of the early design concepts from the XHTML Role Attribute Module, which has got a little lost, is that elements from any language can provide a handy source of role values too.
Ian Forrester interviewed Mark Birbeck whilst they were both at XTech 2008. Subjects mentioned range from XForms, Ajax, Sidewinder, ODF, unobtrusive JavaScript, XUL, standards adoption, New Labour, Hegel's idealism, the Ajax Community, and the Ubiquity XForms processor.
Vertex Financial Services, parent group of leading technology suppliers, 1st - The Exchange, recently announced that Wesleyan Assurance Society has become the first organisation to go live with the new Adviser Evolution technology, a financial services application that makes extensive use of XForms.
XForms is a mark-up language from the W3C for describing all kinds of interactive user interfaces, from simple name and address forms, to shopping-carts, to long and detailed forms such as mortgage and life insurance applications, through to desktop applications.
The team at webBackplane has expertise and experience in XForms that is unparalled.
There is still plenty of scope for the browser to evolve, but the truth is that progressive browser enhancement makes browser evolution far less significant than it has been until now. That's probably not a bad thing, given the chaos that is currently surrounding the development of HTML at the W3C.
I've just finished implementing a new feature in the Sidewinder Viewer, which further simplifies the task of turning any web page into a desktop application. If invoked with a command line argument that specifies the document to load, the viewer now also checks the fragment identifier for the presence of a metaXPointer scheme. The expression associated with this scheme allows you to set a number of application-level properties, such as the window title, height, width, position and so on.
