OPS User Guide

Welcome

1. Introduction

Welcome to the Orbeon PresentationServer (OPS) User Guide, the reference OPS documentation!

OPS is an open source J2EE-based platform for XML-centric web applications. OPS is built around XML technologies such as XHTML, XForms, XSLT, XML pipelines, and web services, which makes it ideal for applications that capture, process and present XML data.

Unlike other popular web application frameworks like Struts or WebWork which are based on Java objects and JSP, OPS is based on XML documents and XML technologies. This leads to an architecture better suited for the tasks of capturing, processing, and presenting information in XML format, and often does not require writing any Java code at all to implement the presentation layer of your web application.

OPS is built around Orbeon's 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:

  • XForms. XForms is the W3C standard for creating complex web forms.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

It is highly recommended to follow the OPS Tutorial to get started with developing applications with OPS, and to refer to the User Guide as a reference.

3. Prerequisites

This guide should be accessible to anyone with some experience developing simple web applications. It is helpful to understand the basics of XML, Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT), and XForms before reading this documentation. For more information, consult the following sources as a starting point:

In addition to online resources, many books about these technologies are available in printed form.