[Catalyst] Which Form Validation Libs?

Toby Corkindale toby at dryft.net
Tue Dec 7 04:02:02 GMT 2010


On 30 November 2010 22:26, Shlomi Fish <shlomif at iglu.org.il> wrote:
> On Tuesday 30 November 2010 11:31:56 David Schmidt wrote:
>> another great module which from my perception is used the most lately is
>>
>> HTML::FormHandler
>> http://search.cpan.org/~gshank/HTML-FormHandler-0.32005/
>>
>
> I can recommend *against* HTML-FormHandler.
>
> For my day job's Perl and Catalyst project, we initially decided to go with
> HTML-FormHandler, only to discover it was buggy, quirky and had severe memory
> leaks. We ended up doing many workarounds and recently made a transition from
> it to HTML-FormFu, which while by no means perfect, is much saner.
>
> My co-worker "nothingmuch" who has done many of the workarounds can provide
> further comments on it. Recently I had to over-ride a role in the login form
> (for which we need to use HTML-FormHandler due to CatalystX::SimpleLogin) that
> will accept an empty string as the 'action=""' attribute because it only
> placed true values of the attribute there, which ruled out empty strings. But
> I recall many other fun hours debugging HTML-FormHandler.

I hit issues with FormHandler and HFH::Model::DBIC having issues with
empty strings vs definedness too, but it was a few months ago. I
submitted some patches that were accepted a few versions back and it's
been pretty good for me since. The code is reasonably logical and easy
to work with, I felt.

By comparison, a major app I built on FormFu earlier in the year
resulted in epic debugging and terribly complex and not-at-all-logical
forms, and the problems seemed more deeply ingrained. (That was a
medium version number at least ago.)

They both have their weaknesses, but having used both, I definitely
think HFH is the way to go at the moment.

Both modules have good authors who are helpful and actively developing.

Cheers,
Toby



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