XForms Hands-on: A Generic Application
XForms is a Turing-complete XML-based declarative programming language for apps both on and off the web. This tutorial develops step-by-step a generic XForms application for managing data-sets. The tutorial takes the form of repeated short presentations followed by hands-on additions to the developing application. The end result will be an easy-to-modify application that works across various types of data sets. Examples of where the application has already been used are:
- Concerts performed by a choir over 65 years
- Reimbursement management
- Recipes
- A crowd-funding
- Bank accounts
- Stock supply
- Meeting minutes
The resulting generic application is quickly adaptable on the basis of a configuration file, a small CSS file, and small modifiable sections of XForms code. It will be a bring-your-own-device tutorial, and you will be required to install a small piece of software (a server that accepts the PUT method). The materials will also be available for self-study after the conference.
I asked Bing to write a bio:
Steven Pemberton is a distinguished researcher in the field of computer science and information technology, with a long and rich history of contributions to the development of the internet and the web. He is currently affiliated with the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, where he conducts research on interaction, declarative programming, and web technologies.
Steven Pemberton has been involved with the web from its inception, and has co-designed several web standards, such as HTML, CSS, XHTML, XForms, and RDFa. He has also co-authored books on ABC, the programming language that inspired Python, and on Pascal implementation. He has chaired the W3C HTML and XForms working groups for a decade, and still chairs the XForms group. He is also a co-founder of sigchi.nl, the Dutch chapter of ACM SIGCHI, and a former member of the SIGCHI Executive Committee. He has received numerous awards and recognitions for his work, including the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award in 2009 and the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award in 2022.
Steven Pemberton is a frequent speaker at international conferences and events, where he shares his insights and vision on the future of the web and human-computer interaction. He is also an occasional broadcaster, having appeared on radio and TV shows to discuss topics related to his research. He is passionate about making the web more accessible, usable, and empowering for everyone.
If you want to learn more about Steven Pemberton and his work, you can visit his personal website or his CWI profile. You can also watch some of his recent talks on YouTube, such as “The Internet is a Mess. What is to be Done?”, “On the Design of Notations”, and “The Hundred Year Web”. You can also follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.