The beginings of a long journey

The idea of OX-Designer (Open Source XForms Designer) originated from a need brought up at the OpenMRS Implementors meeting 2006. OpenMRS is an open source medical record system which currently makes use of Microsoft InfoPath as the method to collect patient data. In the light of providing an alternative data collection method I proposed an XForms alternative.

XForms, for those not familiar with the technology, is a W3C specification for creating a form. It is essentially a form mark-up language that is build on a Model-View-Controller architecture. For more information regarding XForms the XForms site provides an in-depth description.

The project is to create an open source browser based XForms designer/editor. This will allow the user to upload an XForms model (stage 2 will hopefully include a model designer) and design the visual aspect of the form by making use of a WYSIWYG editor. The XForms model is an XML definition of the data that the form collects. The application will be an AJAX based web application and hence has no platform dependencies and the only condition to using the application would be that the user make use of a web browser.