Hello,
I’m planning to build a javascript package that generates xforms and will essentially be a port of the pyxform package. Tentative plan is to achieve parity with CHT’s pyxform fork before expanding scope to the broader xform standard.
I’ll be working off this repository and contributions are welcome.
More updates to come!
Hi @elijah . That’s a really exciting proposal! One feature I would love to see would be a plaintext input file format (eg: csv rather than xls) so it works well with change management (eg: github diffs).
Thanks for sharing your plans @elijah!
It would be helpful for me (and I suspect others) to hear more about what you see as the problems with the current pyxform tool, and what your objectives are for the JS port. For instance, does the current implementation have poor performance, is it hard to maintain or extend, or perhaps it doesn’t work in a particular environment?
Knowing the outcomes your looking for might help align other potential contributors too!
The main reason I want to do this is to learn more about the xform standard while building something cool.
Pyxform today also isn’t easily usable in browser environments without having a backend that supports python. We’re living in a JavaScript world, and these restrictions could hamper development of apps that intend to be purely JS stacks. It would be neat to be able to directly convert forms directly in a browser client and also render them.
I think visibility in the JS ecosystem would be great generally and as we build this out, I’m sure we’ll find more opportunities for improvement.