Mozilla XForms Project threatened by cut-backs

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A couple of weeks ago, I took the second preview release of the Mozilla XForms Project for a spin, demonstrating how it could be used along with the FormsPlayer plug-in for Internet Explorer to create cross-browser XForms.

Unfortunately, despite all the promise of that preview, things are suddenly looking very grim for XForms support in Mozilla. News has come that Novell, in a round of cut-backs, has dismissed the entire development team on the project, including lead developer Allan Beaufour, who wrote about it in his blog.

Though the project was open source and had the support of several volunteer members of the development community, the main development effort was launched and funded by Novell. Without that support, the project–tantalizingly close to a 1.0 release–may not have the momentum to carry it forward for the foreseeable future.

As a fan of XForms, I’m deeply disapointed by this news. I was even preparing a presentation for the Melbourne Open Source Developer Conference on the subject of Mozilla XForms in December. It looks like I’ll have to come up with something different to speak about now.

Update: Allan Beaufour has posted to the netscape.public.mozilla.xml newsgroup regarding the future of the project:

I’m still hanging around for now, and there are both IBM resources and volunteers working on it, so it’s not dead at all. It’ll be finished somehow, no worries.

Kevin YankKevin Yank
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Kevin Yank is an accomplished web developer, speaker, trainer and author of Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL and Co-Author of Simply JavaScript and Everything You Know About CSS is Wrong! Kevin loves to share his wealth of knowledge and it didn't stop at books, he's also the course instructor to 3 online courses in web development. Currently Kevin is the Director of Front End Engineering at Culture Amp.

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