Product roadmap

Upcoming releases

Orbeon Forms 2023.1

Focus:

• revision history of form data

• sharing using token-based permissions

• configurable PDF headers and footer

• Excel and XML exports from the Summary page

• purging of old data in the database

• action for copying controls (doc)

• bulk export of form definitions and form data (possibly import back)

• time-windowed forms

• usability improvements

See the tentative 2023.1 items for details.

Consider:

• low-hanging fruits

• dogfood items

• maintenance items

• spare time items

• top issues

• top RFEs

Please remember that the following schedule is a plan, not a promise:

• 2023-08: tentative release date

Past releases

See the Orbeon Forms release history.

Release strategy

• How often do we release? Since 2020 we have switched to one major release per year with point releases as needed.

• What do releases contain? Releases address both new features and bug-fixes. Point-releases (2020.1.1, 2020.1.2, etc.) essentially contain bug-fixes and sometimes very small features. They are done only when necessary, and only for the PE version of the product. Bigger features are left to the major releases (2019.1, 2019.2, 2020.1, 2021.1, etc.), and we strive to do those on a regular schedule.

Planning strategy

• How far ahead do we plan? Once we've published a major release, we do the planning for the following one. You can see the future releases listed on the open projects page, and from there, see what has been planned for the next release. We don't plan feature or bugs to be included in releases beyond the very next release, so we can react faster to our customers needs, deciding for every release what will best serve our customers.

• How do we decide what improvements to include in a release? A fair amount of the new features we develop are designed in collaboration with our customers, and sponsored by customers through a Dev Support plan. Other features are added to better serve existing and future users of the product. And last, but not least, for every release we strive to do work in each one of the development tracks outlined below.

Development tracks

These are general development tracks which we consider from release to release:

• Mobile – Better support responsive design, and the ability to run our form engine on the client to enable offline support and native apps.

• Performance – While Orbeon Forms has been proven to be able to sustain a fair amount of load, we 're always striving to improve the product in that regard, including reducing memory usage, reducing load time, and improving performance on MySQL.

• Architecture and maintenance – Like any project, Orbeon Forms has some technical debt. It is not possible to remove all of it at once, but, like garbage collection, we want improve the code base incrementally. In addition, we want to look to the future to use the best possible languages and frameworks. This includes: modularizing of the code, taking care of issues flagged as "maintenance", drop old frameworks and adopt new ones (get rid of YUI, use Scala.js), and do more automated testing (we have almost 800 tests, but need more).

• Integration and workflow – We want to make it easier to embed forms, make it easier to use HTTP/DB services for validation, allow forms to be imported/exported with dependencies, better document standard use cases / workflows, make integration with external systems/workflows simpler, include built-in Basic workflow, and more.

• Form Builder modernization – We want to push the envelope and keep improving the usability of Form Builder.

What's in a release

For each release we would like to:

• have bug-fixes

• have at least one new feature (which can be small)

• book one day of work on documentation tasks

• pick one maintenance task (build system, refactoring, …)

The idea is, as some of those tasks are large, to do it incrementally when possible, so that some progress is made.