null is not an object

I seem to have missed this blog from back in April but Mark Birbeck has written about how to implement a Google Suggest type application using XForms [1].

It appears that XForms makes building the application quite simple and may be a good way of doing things, but does it offer the flexibility required for something like the EBA ComboBox? I can envision a situation where someone with little programming expertise would appreciate the mark-up based XForms for building a simple Google Suggest but in reality one generally needs a little more control - that’s why you program with Java rather than Hypercard. XForms may make it easy to build but it is still not a replacement for AJaX since with more abstraction you loose control of the details.

On the other hand, for component vendors like us it might make our job of building components that much easier.

[1] XForms Patterns: Incremental and ‘Google Suggest’