Acroforms and XFA forms are different technologies
The interactive forms that you create in LiveCycle Designer are different than the interactive forms that you create in Adobe Acrobat. If you create an interactive form in Acrobat, your form is based on Adobe’s Acroform technology. This technology dates back to Acrobat version 3, and Adobe provides the “Acrobat Forms API Reference” to provide the technical details for this technology. I would not recommend using Acroform technology because XFA is the better technology.
If you are moving from Acroforms to XFA forms, you need to know a couple of important facts about these two technologies:
1.LiveCycle Designer can edit a PDF form created in Acrobat, but Acrobat cannot edit a PDF form created in Designer.
2.JavaScript works differently in these two technologies. Some of the JavaScript routines that work in Acroforms will not work in XFA forms. Adobe has documented these differences in a 43 page online PDF called, “Converting Acrobat JavaScript for Use in LiveCycle Designer Forms.” Designer is a much more robust tool for using JavaScript in your forms, so I recommend that you learn how to script with the XFA object model. See Chapter 4, “Form Scripting,” for more information.
The problem is that there is a limit on the size of a compiled method in a
Java class file, and that limit is what we're running up against. Recall
that a JSP page is compiled into a servlet, and into essentially only one
method in that servlet. Hence, if your page contains many, many tags, that
method becomes too big, and up comes the exception that you're seeing.
There are a couple of (partial) solutions.
1) Break your giant page up into multiple smaller pages and bring them
together at run time using <jsp:include>. Note that <%@include> won't work,
because that's a compile-time include, which will get you straight back to
the original problem.
2) Look for places to save on tags. For example, the <html:option> tag was
recently extended to allow the specification of the text to display, so
that you can replace this: