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Integrating XForms with Java Application Development: A Myth?

 
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Dear Sirs et Madames,
AM currently reading on XForms with a view to integrating the technology to render the user interface of an already existing application, how possible is this? What are the advantages/disadvantages of doing so?

From what I have read and understand (please correct me if am wrong) you have 2 parts to an XForm: The Model (instance) and the part that renders the user interface. The confusion am having is, with the existing application, I already have a model defined (my classes) and creating the xform model seems to me simply a duplication of effort, am I correct in coming to this conclusion? If so, is there a way to hook up my XForm to my existing classes?

It seems to me XForms in themselves can be used to create a whole application and as such it seems XForms would be an application on top of an application if I were to use it for my user interface, but then am not that experienced with the technology so I may be wrong....

Any advice would be extremely valuable and as such, thanking you profusely in advance.
 
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From my 90 seconds of googling, it looks to me like the "model" for XForms is the model of the forms, not the model of the underlying data. No doubt there's a relationship between the two, but I don't see them as being synonymous. And no doubt you could write code to connect the two together, that's what GUI application programming is all about anyway.
 
Phoenix Kilimba
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Thanks for the response. My concern though was that there would be a duplication of efforts because my java classes would also be represented in XForms as models, i.e.


Would be a dupication of my class Book


Do you see what I mean about the duplication of modeling? Is there no way of using the already existing model (my class) as there seems to be a 1:1 mapping between XForms model and Java Class.

Thanks in advance
 
Paul Clapham
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Yes, I suppose that could happen. But there are plenty of Java-bean-to-XML-document mappers, so you could (for example) use JAXB to map a Java object to its version of XML and then map that to XForms's version using XSLT. As far as I can see you can choose whatever tools you like because I didn't find too much in the way of XForms-in-Java projects in my Google search.
 
Phoenix Kilimba
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Thanks Paul thats very helpful and its a start in terms of where I need to research. Will let you know how successful it all is.
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