Where XForms Meets the Glass

We have observed two prevalent design paradigms for web applications: those who start from an existing data or process definition and project from that outward toward the user, and those conversely who start from a sense of desired user experience and derive from that required data and process elements. Design methods which seem natural to one community may look overly abstract, layered with unnecessary separation of concerns, and academic to no purpose. Conversely, others may be frustrated by a seeming lack of concern for reuse, valid content, and support for multiple design roles all of which may argue for additional architectural layers. Due to affinity of current web presentation technology to JSON encoded data, many times the choice to start with user experience precludes re-use of existing XML data. We present an approach to bridging this methodology and data divide by working within the conventions of existing web application frameworks to introduce incremental separation of concerns such as Model-View layering with interfaces and behavior suited to the introduction of XML-based technologies such as XForms at the model layer. In this way we hope to provide incremental means to adopt first a separation of concerns that supports packaging and reuse of model data and behavior, and secondly an XML-based technology for such data models that supports convenient projection of existing business data and process definitions to the client for user interaction.