Summary of Rebuttal in 2007

In March 2007, Kurt Cagle wrote a rebuttal to the XForms vs Ruby on Rails post. There are some key points in this post that are fundamental for "Agile XML". Pay attention to the quote printed in bold font for example.

Here are some quotations from the post "xforms vs. ruby - a rebuttal (sort of)" written on March 30th 2007 by Kurt Cagle:

"Adriaan de Jonge's article Xforms vs. Ruby on Rails has created quite a stir in both the XML and Ruby communities, and for good reason. He asked a fairly important question - are XForms an also-ran technology that Ruby has managed to supplant?"

"My quibble with the argument is that to me Ruby is an apple, XForms an orange - or perhaps more accurately, Ruby is a framework, XForms is a systems component."

"[...]  regardless of whether you are working with XForms or Ruby or ASP.NET, your data models are likely to be considerably more complex than a single stream of static XML"

"The XForms architecture pushes the level of abstraction up a level. In this case, the components that you interact with on the page are not actually involved in maintaining the data model - only in changing it. This is a subtle distinction, but an important one."

"This is actually a pretty profound expression of Model/View/Controller architecture."

"XForms is useless for a fair number of web development tasks."

"[...] XForms applications are most likely going to be utilized precisely in those areas where Ruby won't be."

"Where XForms comes into its own is when you're dealing with data - lots and lots of data."

"Most of the clients that I deal with when building XForms applications are not, in fact, looking at building another community site."

"I personally think that the days of shrink-wrapped software are history."

"Increasingly, software is becoming oriented towards helping people with lots and lots of data get at that data more effectively."

"It actually works better in conjunction with something else, which I am increasingly coming to believe is an web-enabled XML database working with either XQuery or XSLT (preferably both)."

"XML has become THE language of data transfer."

"[...] in an XQuery/XForms/XSLT solution, you are quite literally floating in an XML sea, where XML coming from a collection or external server is only a function call away."

"XForms has taken off in those places where it's most suited, and this even before there's a native version of XForms sitting in a browser."

"I'd far more like to see XForms and Ruby on Rails rather than XForms vs. Ruby‚ and I suspect so would your customers."

And this is one of the comments on this article:

"Thanks for these insights. Adriaan's posting was impressive, almost intimidating, so it's good to have some balance from another web tech / XML guru. Here I was wondering if I needed to abandon XForms for RoR. (Incidentally, you keep referring to "Ruby" but I think Adriaan's argument was really only about Ruby on Rails.)

[...]

So there is a real value to being able to pick one framework and stick with it. Part of the value of RoR over XForms is that RoR provides the whole stack (or at least more of it).

Lars | July 11, 2007 08:15 AM"