The problem is present art systems is that developers have no structured method to generate and process documents that use the XForms XML form standard, such as IBM's WorkPlace Forms™. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a general-purpose markup language. It is classified as an extensible language because it allows its users to define their own tags. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of data across different information systems, particularly via the Internet. XForms is an XML format for the specification of a data processing model for XML data and user interface(s) for the XML data, such as web forms. Forms was designed to be the next generation of HTML/XHTML forms, but is generic enough that it can also be used in a standalone manner or with presentation languages other than XHTML to describe a user interface and a set of common data manipulation tasks. There are currently no known solutions to this problem. All known integrations of XForms are custom-rolled for a specific host application.
There is a present need for a new system, method and framework for generating and processing XForms documents such that developers need only write loosely coupled components that implement the minimal application-specific interface code, and the system, method and framework should coordinate generation and processing based on a description of the form's lifecycle. It also should allow developers to reuse components created for other integrations that implemented the framework. It also should to significantly reduce development effort to integrate XForms with a vast number of applications, while all known solutions are specific to a single integration case.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds