XML News from Friday, September 8, 2006

IBiblio is upgrading server hardware starting tonight at 6:00 P.M. EDT. This and other IBiblio hosted sites will be up and down sporadically between then and 6:00 P.M. Saturday. I will likely not be able to check e-mail at my metalb address for most of that time either.


IBM's alphaWorks has updated the XML Forms Generator, a data-driven Eclipse plug-in that "generates forms that adhere to the XForms 1.0 standard, using as a starting point either Web Service Description Language (WSDL) documents or XML instance documents having optional XML Schema backing models. The generated forms adhere to the XHTML and XForms 1.0 standards and can be viewed in popular XHTML and XForms renderers." This release adds support for Eclipse 3.2 and a schema-flattening utility.

IBM has also released the Visual XForms Designer, an Eclipse plug-in for graphicaly editing XForms. This product sits on top of the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF), Graphical Editing Framework (GEF), and Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP). This release integrates the WTP XML Editor and supports Eclipse 3.2.

Both the XML Forms Generator and the Visual Forms Designer are part of the Emerging Technologies Toolkit (ETTK), which is a polite way of saying they're closed source and more than likely IBM will eventually abandon them without ever making them available for production use; either as closed or open source.