The process from specification to finished form starts with developing the form in the Adobe LiveCycle Designer. They developed more than a hundred forms, and while a number were rendered as PDF, most forms were designated to be used as HTML forms and this is our focus in the following. The current experience report is based on a series of projects centered around Adobe forms, carried out at a leading Norwegian insurance company in the period 2005 - 2007. The latter is required when rendering the form with the forms server, where the same XDP can be rendered as either HTML, as a static PDF document or as an interactive PDF form. The form design created in the Designer can either be saved as a PDF, or in the Adobe proprietary XML Data Package (XDP) file format. The Adobe LiveCycle Designer is a standalone tool which enables the form developer to design the graphical style of the form, work with the layout of form fields of different types and add calculations and interaction logic. However, this server component, commonly referred to as the "form server", is only handling the form rendering, and is reliant upon another product in the LiveCycle suite to supply the form definitions, namely the Adobe LiveCycle Designer. Īdobe LiveCycle Forms is a Java EE web application currently supporting IBM Websphere, BEA Weblogic or JBoss Java EE application servers. Originally named Adobe Forms Server by Adobe, the latest major release (version 7 released in 2005) was branded into Adobes "LiveCycle" suite of PDF-centred document and process management Java EE products, becoming "Adobe LiveCycle Forms". In 2002, Adobe purchased Accelio and throughout four major releases expanded the system, with the most important improvement arguably being the support for rendering XML templates into the PDF format. Originally a COM-based solution written in Visual Basic, it was later replaced by Java and J2EE. The main incentive behind the XFA technology was that a single XML form template could dynamically generate forms for several different clients. It was based around JetForms' self-developed XML Forms Architecture (XFA) technology. BACKGROUNDĪdobe LiveCycle Forms began as a research project in 1999 by Canadian-based JetForms (later Accelio) and was originally released as "ReachForm". Adobe was rated number one in Forrester's "Current Offering" category, evaluating the form design interface, capabilities in forms deployment and processing as well as architectural aspects, while IBM came out on top when comparing the corporate and product strategies of the vendors in the study. Adobe LiveCycle Forms was found to be the clear market leader together with IBM Workplace Forms, in a product evaluation performed by Forrester, evaluating five e-forms software vendors (the others being Cardiff's LiquidOffice Forms, Microsoft's InfoPath and FileNet P8 eForms).
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