Forms Wizard is an online tool for designing forms. Why should you support such a Pozible project? Well, there is a short answer and a long answer to that question! The short answer is this: I hope that Forms Wizard will become the "go-to" place for forms and even more than that, it will be free and will require no registration. You can just copy a form, modify an existing form or design one from scratch, no questions asked!

Now, here is the long answer, or at least a shortened version of the long-answer. Forms are everywhere, we use them for collecting information, and we are used to paper-forms. Now though, paper forms are becoming a thing of the past. People are moving to electronic forms and, not surprisingly, there are companies happy to sell a solution to this 'problem' of how to design, distribute and collect forms and collate data entered into forms.

As forms are so common, you would think that 'market forces' would make a solution to these requirements very cheap. Well, somewhat surprisingly, that doesn't seem to be the case, yet! So, the 'big-picture' challenge being addressed by Forms Wizard is to make the creation of all forms, from very simple to very complex, something that can be easily accomplished by most people. The way to do this cheaply is to use the web-browser as the delivery platform and leverage the efficiencies of the web.


A key aspect of the Forms Wizard project is that a solution to these requirements was provided in 2003, 10 years ago! This was a radically new way of creating forms in web-pages called XForms, that was released as a standard by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international community that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web.

"So, what happened?" you might well be asking, this is where the story gets long. Basically some key players decided that forms where too important to be done in a browser and that an separate application and/or delivery platform was needed, which is interesting considering that there is money to be made in doing so! The essential thing about browser standards is that everyone who makes a browser has to agree to support the standards or they go nowhere, sadly that is the story of XForms, that is, till now!

I believe that the design concepts of the XForms standard were so good, that it basically refused to die. It has lived on in the form of several projects that allow XForms browser support to be faked! There are now several excellent XForm 'support emulation' projects, that are available for free use.

The concepts behind XForms are to some extent being adopted in other non-forms related Javascript libraries, but XForms is, in significant ways, still unique. Forms Wizard will build on this sound foundation in several ways. For example, XForms can be used to build forms that are used for building other forms, this has been shown in proof-of-concept work done already. Apart from this 'model-generated' forms approach, a more traditional WYSIWYG graphical approach will be added as well. These two approaches will complement each other.


Put simply, forms provide a way to interact with data; to create, view, update, query and delete it. XForms provides a very versatile framework, one that can be employed with many data formats including XML, JSON, CSV and even simple Spreadsheets. This versatility arises mainly from the fact that XForms is in turn based on other W3C web standards, which, in total, have been created to further the development of the World Wide Web as a "giant database".

These W3C standards provide a way of working with data that can be aptly described as being 'data-driven'. This is my main interest, to explore an alternative way of working with data that is intrinsically web-based 'from the ground up' and to build something of value. Something that I believe should already exist, but which presently is limited to expensive proprietary software.

So, while others a busy looking at how to deal with 'Big Data' I am convinced that there is still a lot to be done with 'Small Data'. The goal is to make working with data on the web nearly as simple (and cheap) as creating a web-page is now (at least in terms of writing a blog or an email online has become). I think this is an original vision of the web that is still to be fully realised.

XForms provides similar capabilities as PDF forms. PDF forms are the so-called 'SmartForms' technology promoted by the Australian Government. It's a strong possibility that the forms designed with Forms Wizard will be readily convertable to PDF SmartForms, I am currently investigating this and will update this project description soon with the results.

Once fully developed, Forms Wizard software will be freely available to anyone who might wish to use it in their own systems, subject to the conditions of the open-source licence (LGPL) under which it will be released.

Also, after completing the project, I intend to offer a cost-effective service so that the forms you design with Forms Wizard can be 'hosted' for you online. Anyone will be able to offer a similar service. Such hosted forms can be embedded into any web-site, as this demo shows.

Why should I wish to develop such a thing and effectively give it away you might ask - well here are several reasons:


By achieving the goals of this project I am hoping to foster use of XForms, such as in the scientific domain, where my interest started. But to achieve this, a true 'Forms Wizard' is needed - one that gives the user fast results without necessarily having to understand all the finer detail. The cost of designing user-interface forms is often a main component of the total cost of database systems.


Forms Wizard will be entirely browser based, effectively its just a normal web-page with some clever script (code) that gives it application levels of dynamic functionality.

This means that once built, the cost of providing Forms Wizard is effectively zero. The designed forms can be saved locally to disk, or to an online web-server. This second option is actually quite sensible as forms need to be distribited to users, for which a web-server is ideal, and similarly any data that gets submitted from the forms by users also needs to be saved centrally. Such online data storage services have become very cheap.

In true 'free and open-source software' tradition, I intend to give away the software but gain income by offering services related to it. This is reflected in the rewards I am offering for your support.


The Forms Wizard project is currently at a 'proof-of-concept' stage. This work has been continued as a personal hobby with the primary goal of demonstrating the effectiveness of using a specific forms auto-generation approach based on XML schema (data-model) design, as shown a more complex demo.

A goal is now to finish this 'proof-of-concept' project and refine it to a version that is reliable across browsers and then to provide suitable documentation and video learning resources to allow its use by anyone. This is a low risk outcome.

This schema based approach is familiar to people who have used desktop database applications like Microsoft Access that allow you to design your database schema of table and field definitions then, to generate forms from those table definitions. Forms Wizard is similar but more user-friendly than one based on 'relational' schemas, due largely to the flexibility of XML schemas.

At the same time though, there is a need to provide an alternative, and more familiar, drag-and-drop, layout based form designer interface. This work has not been started as yet, but others have gone down this path already, several server-based XForms frameworks provide this kind of designer, but there is potential to do more and to make it readily available online for free use. Also, several such designers that did exist are no longer readily available, either being absorbed into commercial products or the result of academic research projects. This is the second main goal of the Forms Wizard project.


Based on the work done to date there are good reasons to think that XForms and existing related free and open-source XForms software can be used as the basis for achieving these goals.

The XForms 'declarative' approach to building forms, where you state what you want as opposed to how it should be done, avoids most of the need for scripting to achieve common things like data validation. This declarative approach is the foundation of the form generation demo work done already. However, more complex forms can be developed, perhaps with one or more generated forms as a starting point to save some time. So for some, having a more in-depth knowledge of XForms is useful, hence the offer of a discount on a 1 day XForms training course as a reward for a $500 pledge.

At the same time, XForms, being XML based and declarative, also provides an efficient way to preserve the state of a designer tool. That is, to save it and then to reload and recreate the current state at a later time, many design tools make use XML for this purpose due to its flexibility. So it seems that these XML features of XForms can be leveraged to build both the schema based and the layout based designers and to integrate both of them into a single package, the 'Forms Wizard'.


The $8000 funding being sought is to allow me to work full time on this project and bring it to completion, also afterwards to develop an XForms based training course and deliver it as a reward for pledges made, and to others going forwards.

As stated there is no intention to profit directly from the outcome of this work. As well as achieving the goals described above, it will form the basis of on-going software development by myself, and hopefully others in the 'free and open-source software' community as well. If browsers ever support XForms natively, however unlikely, then this work will still be valid.

I think that there is much more to be done after this project. If successful I'd like to get further support via crowd-funding, it seems to be a very good fit for free and open-source software development.