Programming

Mozilla XForms Project threatened by cut-backs

    Kevin Yank
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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.