XSLTForms/Background

XSLTForms has its origin in the AJAXForms project, an open source project (under the Lesser GNU Public License, LGPL) undertaken by AjaxForms S.L. of Pontevedra, Spain.

AJAXForms is a server-side XForms 1.0 implementation: it uses a Java program controlled by Ant to convert XForms documents (i.e. XML documents in the XHTML and XForms namespaces) into HTML documents and Javascript files. The result is an AJAX-based HTML page which behaves as specified by the XForm input, but which can be viewed and processed with Web browsers which do not support XForms natively.

The Java program used by AJAXForms to do the transformation is mainly based on an XSLT 1.0 transformation, but it also uses Jaxen (a Java XPath engine) to analyze XPath expressions.

AJAXForms has been dormant and unsupported since November 2006.

The XSLTForms project picked up the AJAX Javascript libraries developed by AJAXForms and replaced the Ant-driven server-side Java transformation with an XSLT 1.0 transformation that can run either on the server or in the browser. The first commits to the XSLTForms project's SourceForge repository were in November 2008. Since then, several versions of the software have been released; these have all been labeled beta as beta releases, until 2012, when a 1.0 release candidate (1.0RC) was put out. A second 1.0 release candidate (1.0RC2) was issued in 2014.

A number of users contribute comments, suggestions, and occasional code, but most of the work on XSLTForms is done by Alain Couthures, the founder of AgenceXML of Eysines, France (on the outskirts of Bordeaux).