Increasing agility with NoSQL - Making Sense of NoSQL - page 204

XForms is an example of a declarative domain-specific language customized for
data entry forms. Like other declarative systems, XForms allows you to specify what
you want the forms to do but tries to avoid the details of how the forms perform the
work.
XForms is a collection of approximately 25 elements that are used to implement
complex business forms. A sample of XForms markup is shown in figure 9.9.
Because XForms is a W3C standard, it reuses many of the same standards found in
XQuery such as XPath and XML Schema datatypes. XForms works well with native
XML databases.
There are several ways to implement an XForms solution. You can use a number of
open source XForms frameworks (Orbeon, BetterForm, XSLTForms, OpenOffice 3)
or a commercial XForms framework ( IBM Workplace, EMC XForms). These tools
work with web browsers to interpret the XForms elements and convert them into the
appropriate behavior. Some XForms tools from Orbeon, OpenOffice, and IBM also
have form-builder tools that use XForms to lay out and connect the form elements to
your model.
After you've created your form, you need to be able to save your form data to the
database. This is where using a native XML database shines. XForms stores the data
Figure 9.9 This figure shows how data from a native XML database is loaded into the
model of XForms. Once the XML data is loaded into the model, XForms views will allow the
user to edit the model content in a web form. When the user selects Save, the model is
saved without change directly into the database. No object-relational mapping is needed.