Mulberry Technologies, Inc. 17 West Jefferson St., Suite 207 Rockville, MD 20850 '> For , , , and , see the Mulberry Technologies contact page.

: Mulberry's facilities are on the second floor; access is by stairway; there is neither a ramp nor an elevator. For more information, please contact Black Mesa Technologies at 505/747-4224.

'> ]> Introduction to XForms for XML users Building interactive XML tools with XForms Española, New Mexico Black Mesa Technologies LLC 2012

No source; created in electronic form.

 Introduction to XForms Introduction to XForms for XML users &city-state; &course-dates; &date.last.touched;

This two-day hands-on course introduces XForms as a technology for building special-purpose XML editors with limited functionality and correspondingly simple user interfaces.

XForms is built on the model / view / controller idiom, in which the ‘model’ is a set of XML documents, the ‘view’ is specified using XHTML and XForms controls (or widgets), and the ‘controller’ takes the form of declarative links between controls in the view and elements or attributes in the XML documents. With XForms, projects can develop vocabulary- and task-specific editors which require less training and provide better task-specific support than full XML editors; it is thus easier to allow domain experts to examine and modify XML encoding, and routine tasks can be performed more quickly and reliably.

Topics and syllabus

The course is divided into eight sessions, four to a day:

Introduction

High-level overview of XForms, background, goals and purpose of the XForms spec; Hello, world example

Atomic values and simple structures (1)

A simple form; multiple submit buttons; enumerated values and vocabulary control; conditional relevance; datatypes; validation.

Atomic values and simple structures (2)

Error messages, help, hints; validation beyond datatypes; styling the form; adjusting for alternate XML structures.

Multi-part user interfaces

Coding patterns for tabbed interfaces, wizards, user-selected alternate views (e.g. summary vs. details, novice vs expert, etc.). Multiple instances; dynamic user interfaces.

Homogeneous repetitions

Handling flat lists; paging through records, one record at a time; running off the cliff and how to avoid it. Read-only lists; lists of editable items; see-many, edit-one interfaces.

Read-write repetitions, CRUD operations

Special styling for focus item; two-pane views. Inserting items; initializing new items. Deleting items.

Mixed content, heterogeneous sequences

Dealing with (flat) heterogeneous sequences; dealing with variable-depth sequences. Extensions to XForms: tree editors, general mixed-content editors. Doing without the extensions: targeted editing in mixed content, offloading work to XSLT.

What next? Individual work and/or Q/A

Where do you go from here? Individual work or questions and answers; wrapup.

During the class, students will develop a small XForms application with a multi-part interface, multiple widget types, and the ability to add, modify, and delete records in a set. Students will be encouraged to take their class exercise files with them so that they can continue to work with them after the class.

Prerequisites

Participants should be comfortable editing XML documents and have some knowledge of HTML markup. Familiarity with XPath and XSLT is helpful but not required. Programming experience is not required.

Students may bring their own laptops or may use a classroom machine.

The machine must support wifi networking and have a browser with support for Javascript and XSLT (any reasonably current version of most major browsers will work) as well as software the student can comfortably use for editing XML documents.

Logistics
When and where

This course will be held from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. &course-dow;, &course-dates;, at &course-address; Thanks to &hostorg; for hosting the course.

&local-info;
Who

The course is organized by Black Mesa Technologies LLC and will be taught by C. M. Sperberg-McQueen.

Michael Sperberg-McQueen is the founder of Black Mesa Technologies. He has served as co-editor of the XML 1.0 specification, the Text Encoding Initiative's Guidelines for Text Encoding and Interchange, and the XML Schema Definition Language (XSD) 1.1 specification; in 2003 he was awarded the XML Cup for contributions to the development and spread of XML.

&hostorg-inc; is providing space (for which thanks), but has no other involvement with the course.

Breaks and meals

: Coffee and simple pastries will be provided.

: For lunch, you are on your own. A list of nearby eateries will be provided; you are also welcome to bring your own lunch.

Price

&course-price; per student.

Payment can be made by check, credit card, Paypal payment, or government training/purchase order on or before the first day of class.

: For payments received before &earlybird-deadline;, a ten percent discount is offered (&earlybird-price; instead of &course-price; for the course).

Registration / Info

Space in the course is limited.

To reserve a space, to register, or to ask for more information, please send email to info@blackmesatech.com or call us at 505/747-4224.

Announcements of future courses

To receive announcements of future Black Mesa Technologies courses on XForms and other topics, you can subscribe to blackmesatech-announce-l.