Welcome
1. Orbeon PresentationServer (OPS)
Welcome to the reference documentation for the Orbeon PresentationServer (OPS) platform.
Orbeon PresentationServer is an open source platform that uses standard XForms to make your form-based web applications more user-friendly and simpler to create.
Unlike other web application frameworks based on Java objects or scripting languages, OPS is based on XML documents and XForms. This leads to an architecture perfectly suited for the tasks of capturing, processing, and presenting XML data, and does not require writing any Java or scripting code at all to implement a dynamic presentation layer for your web application.
OPS is built around a user-friendly Ajax-based XForms engine, which brings standard W3C XForms to mainstream browsers, and the XPL engine, a mature, high-performance XML pipeline engine for processing XML data.
2. Purpose of the User Guide
The purpose of this guide is to get you acquainted with the main components of OPS:
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XForms. XForms is the W3C standard for creating complex web forms.
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The Page Flow Controller (PFC). The PFC is the heart of your OPS application. It defines your application's pages and how you navigate between them.
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The XML Pipeline Definition Language (XPL). XPL allows you to implement lightweight processes that handle XML data, without writing a single line of Java or other scripting language.
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OPS's built-in XML components. The built-in OPS XML components provide services such as accessing databases, performing data transformations, calling web services, and more. If you need more, you can write your own XML components.