Yesterday saw the release of the Preview for InfoPath SP1, InfoPath 2003 Service Pack 1 Preview .
The XForms community had been, to my mind at least, surprisingly quiet about XForms design tools so I posed the question yesterday, XForms Design Tools - What is out there? , as to what XForms design tools are now available.
One of the replies drew attention to XFormation . On first look it seems very promising and my initial impression is that it is the best XForms design tool I have seen so far. It is significantly more expensive per copy than InfoPath 2003 but does have the advantage that the documents it creates should be usable across the Internet from a conventional Web browser.
Off list responses indicated that other XForms design tools are under development and aren't too far away from public launch.
So, it seems that XForms ought to be of significant interest over the coming months.
With InfoPath SP1 scheduled for late June, some XForms design tools now appearing and the likely appearance of the Adobe XML/PDF design tool (announced in mid 2003), the XML forms space should be a focus of lots of attention.
For businesses which store or pass data as XML the availability of several XML forms tools makes this an interesting space to keep an eye on.
Posted by Andrew Watt at February 24, 2004 12:42 PM