Novell, as part of its ongoing efforts to drive the adoption of industry standards, today announced its participation in an initiative to bring the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) XForms 1.0 Recommendation to open source. Novell and IBM will work
with the Mozilla Foundation to contribute expertise to the development of an XForms implementation for the Mozilla browser. Novell currently uses the XForms standard to provide visual tools in its exteNd Web
services platform and will contribute source code from its production-proven implementation to the project.
The XForms standard defines the next generation of Web-based forms, reducing the complexity of developing Web pages and forms that interact with Web services and display information to any Web-enabled device. Novell has been the leading advocate of XForms technology since its inception through the W3C and was the first to deliver an Xforms implementation in its Web services platform.
“Novell is committed to delivering the interoperability of standards-based technology, and our work with the Mozilla Foundation and IBM to deliver an XForms implementation for Mozilla offers a compelling
opportunity to influence the future of Web development,” said David Litwack, senior vice president for Novell exteNd and Nsure. “Linux and Mozilla are more than simple open source success stories. They are
leading the IT community by delivering viable alternatives that reduce the unnecessary investment and resource dependencies of competitive proprietary solutions.”
The Mozilla Foundation supports the Mozilla project, a leading community of open source developers committed to driving innovation in Web technology. Upcoming versions of the Mozilla Internet suite and
products embedding Mozilla technology can optionally include the implementation developed by the Mozilla XForms project. This will also allow Linux desktops to run XForms as a native capability of the Mozilla browser.
Last week at LinuxWorld, Novell announced the availability of two products that will help bring XForms to the large and active community of Linux developers. Novell exteNd 5.2 builds upon Novell’s commitment to XForms by delivering it on Linux, including the latest version of Novell’s leading Linux distribution, SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9. Developers can use Novell exteNd’s drag-and-drop tools to visually create these standards-based XForms, portlets and applications with far less development effort than required by other leading solutions.
For more information on Novell’s involvement with XForms, please visit http://www.novell.com/xforms. For details on the Mozilla Xforms project, please visit http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xforms/. The W3C
Web site for information on the XForms 1.0 recommendation is
http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/REC-xforms-20031014/.
