Phil Booth's blog

Having spent the majority of my last four years working on the likes of Ubiquity XForms, Hubbub and UBX, I've found it rather nostalgic to get back to working on Ubiquity formsPlayer during the last few weeks. So much so, in fact, that I decided to take the opportunity to delve back through the source control logs and brush up on the old girl's history a bit.

The initial project commit was made by Mark, on the morning of Monday 13th May, 2002. I joined the project a shade less than a year later, on 6th May 2003, before making my first commit exactly one month after that, on 6th June. Full conformance to the XForms Recommendation (or Proposed Recommendation, as it was then) was announced on 22nd September of the same year, before formsPlayer 1.0 was made generally available on 13th February, 2004. The five-and-a-half years since that first release have seen eight subsequent point releases, four different source control repositories, an aborted formsPlayer 2.0 branch and (belatedly) two new versions of Internet Explorer from Microsoft.

Reading back through all that, the over-riding impression I get is one of maturity. And, although most of our energy has been directed elsewhere for the last year or so, Ubiquity formsPlayer remains a key project for us, for precisely that reason. Things may have gone quiet on the old formsPlayer website, but we're still actively developing the project for our customers and, now that it is open source, you can track our progress on the project's Google Code site.

The latest release is version 1.8.1023, built yesterday and tested against versions 6, 7 and 8 of Internet Explorer. If you're still using an old version of formsPlayer, please consider upgrading and giving us your feedback in the issue tracker or on the mailing list.