The hardest part of writing transactional Web applications is finding a way to produce dynamic pages. The main underlying component of these pages, HTML forms, was added to what was originally a static, document-based standard, to allow the simple exchange of data between the user and the Web site. The more complex the information and the more sophisticated the interaction, the harder it's been to create these pages.

Worse, HTML was originally intended for browsers, but today we consume information in an ever-growing variety of ways. Attempts have been made to simplify the process, but nothing has fully addressed these issues because the underlying technology is too limited.

Until now - XForms, the next generation of forms to be included in the XHTML standard, and now a W3C Candidate Recommendation, improves on HTML forms by cleanly separating data, logic, and presentation. This new standard will not only make development better structured, but will also pave the way for a new generation of development tools.

XForms arrives as an ever-increasing percentage of information is moving across the Internet as XML. As the use of Web services increases, more business systems are being exposed using this standard. With new, easy-to-use tools to define XML integration, transformation, and mapping, there will soon be a huge repository of information and transactions available as distributed XML. The primary benefits of XForms are abstract description of presentation, independent of device; data binding between presentation components and XML instance data; and a range of interaction and logic capabilities without procedural programming.

XForms provides an abstract metadata description of presentation components such as selection lists and edit boxes. At runtime, this metadata is processed by "renderers" - server- or client-side components that translate the abstract to a specific implementation. As a result, XForms may be flexibly rendered in browsers by generating XHTML (either from the server or via a built-in or plug-in renderer), in rich clients by Java or Windows renderers, in specialized document formats such as PDF, and eventually by device-specific, vendor-supplied renderers in a variety of handheld devices.

In a world in which the way we connect and display information is constantly evolving, this moves the burden of adapting presentation from the developer to the vendor. At the recent XForms Implementation Workshop, some 20 such renderers were identified (see Novell's XForms preview at www.novell.com/xforms).

Web services allow developers to abstract out the process of navigating and accessing information contained in a variety of physical stores and based on diverse technologies. The focus has been on simplifying the creation of services via the integration layer. Once the service is created, the metaphor becomes one of an XML request/response, with the processing in between becoming a black box, transparent to the consumer.

But this still leaves the burden on the developer to construct and deconstruct the XML. XForms presentation components may be bound to XML instance data, moving this burden to the underlying renderer. XForms will allow for end-to-end Web services, making the consumption of services as simple and high-level as the creation.

Most dramatically, XForms will enable the next generation of development tools to be more appropriate and productive for the mainstream business developer. Each generation of application architecture evolves from lower-level, early-adopter technologies to higher-level approaches that raise the level of abstraction. For example, client/server development tools provided increased productivity to that generation by making the definition of presentation visual, graphically generating SQL, and creating the relationship between the two. We've come up with many technologies to solve the equivalent Web problem: Perl, PHP, ASP, servlets, JSP, XSLT, and so on. None has been able to solve the issue of the complexity of forms development.

Combining Web services and XForms will enable the first high-level tools for developing services-oriented applications. While they will occasionally require dropping into lower-level code, the predominant development process will be at a higher level. It will have the feel of "XML programming" and will enable more rapid delivery of next-generation Web applications.

Web services, easily composed from existing information sources, combined with high-productivity tools for the rapid development of applications that consume XML - enabled by XForms - will be the key to dramatically increased business agility.