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FAQ

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ebruchez edited this page Jan 17, 2014 · 29 revisions

See also:

  • [FAQ: Software licences](FAQ: Software licences)
  • Legacy FAQ

What is Orbeon Forms?

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What differentiates Orbeon Forms from other web solutions?

A few things come to mind:

  1. Orbeon Forms is not intended to be a general-purpose web app platform, but instead focuses on forms, typically large forms, and handling many of them. It's not uncommon for users to have hundreds of forms to create and deploy, or to have forms with hundreds of fields (sometimes more than 1000 fields).

  2. Although from time to time customization is required, and some complex rules do require the use of XPath, Orbeon Forms strives not to require coding in Java, JavaScript or other programming languages. Instead, Orbeon Forms provides an authoring tool and a runtime environment that try to do as much as possible out of the box.

  3. Orbeon Forms does not rely on any particular proprietary technology, unlike solutions from some large companies.

Is there any cost associated with using Orbeon Forms?

Professional Edition (PE) builds are available through PE Subscription plans. Further commercial support is available with Dev Support plans.

Community Edition (CE) builds are available free of charge whether your use it to build open source or commercial applications.

The complete source code to Orbeon Forms CE and PE is available free of charge and under real open source terms. Note that out of the box, the build file creates a CE build.

With the open source code, you are free as you please to:

  • extend the platform
  • build applications on top of the platform

Note however that if you make changes to the existing Orbeon Forms code, you are bound by the terms of the LGPL license, which requires you to redistribute changes to the open source community when you distribute your application.

Is Orbeon Forms an XForms Engine?

Orbeon Forms includes an XForms engine (also known as an XForms processor), which we refer to as the Orbeon Forms XForms engine.

But Orbeon Forms also includes:

  • the Form Builder authoring tool
  • the Form Runner runtime
  • an XML pipeline engine running the XPL pipeline language
  • an application controller (the Page Flow Controller or PFC)

You are free to use Orbeon Forms for its XForms functionality only, but you can also leverage more of Orbeon Forms to build your forms-based application.

See also the other parts of this FAQ.

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