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ebruchez edited this page Oct 23, 2013 · 29 revisions

General Orbeon Forms FAQ

What is Orbeon Forms?

Orbeon Forms is an open source, standard-based web forms solution, which includes:

  • Form Builder: a browser-based WYSIWYG form authoring tool (also known as a form designer)
  • Form Runner: a runtime environment which facilitates the deployment and integration of large and complex forms
  • a core forms processing engine which implements the XForms specification and an XBL-inspired component model

For more information about Orbeon Forms, please visit orbeon.com.

Orbeon Forms is based on XML documents and XForms. This leads to an architecture perfectly suited for the tasks of capturing, processing, and presenting XML data (in particular form data), and does not require writing any Java, JavaScript or other scripting code at all.

Is there any cost associated with using Orbeon Forms?

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

Professional Edition (PE) builds are available through PE Subscription plans.

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.

Orbeon offers commercial support for Orbeon Forms via PE Subscription plans and Dev Support plans.

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.

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