[Catalyst] FormHandler -- pro or con?

[Octavian Rasnita]

From: "Toby Corkindale" <toby at dryft.net>

> On 7 December 2010 18:03, Octavian Rasnita <orasnita at gmail.com> wrote:
>> From: "Toby Corkindale" <toby at dryft.net>
>>
>>> On 1 December 2010 02:34, will trillich <will.trillich at serensoft.com> wrote:
>>>> Anybody else *dissing* FormHandler? We've started developing based on
>>>> FormHandler lately and haven't had troubles... yet?
>>>
>>> I'm running it, and have been very happy with it.
>>> It's nice that you can put all your common form elements into roles
>>> and then combine them.
>>> I'm familiar with Moose, so HFH's syntax came fairly naturally to me,
>>> but I guess it could be confusing to others?
>>>
>>> Performance is reasonable - and a lot faster compared to FormFu.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Toby
>>
>>
>> Is there a way of making H::FH beeing more elegant?
>>
>> I mean, is there a way of doing something to not need using Perl code for creating the forms, but only using some configuration files like in H::FF's case?
> 
> I guess there is more than one way to do everything..
> I didn't like having to write YAML for H:FF, since YAML is ugly, and
> then one needed to take multiple YAML files and merge them a lot,
> and.. ugh.

I agree. That's why I never use yaml. But H::FF can use other config formats. I use the Apache-style format...
 
> Using Moose Roles for forms is awesome.

I also agree with this idea, but the fact that the most used constraints, filters and validators should be also manually specified using Perl code is not so nice.
It would be nice to have a form processor like H::FF that provides many default HTML elements, constraints, filters and validators, and to be able to create custom elements, constraints, filters and validators using Moose roles, then to specify that those roles are used... using config files.
Actually, I guess that is possible to create them using Moose with H::FF although I am not sure.

Ideally, the web designers that don't know Perl at all should be able to change the design of the forms at least.

Octavian