[Catalyst] Best "form" library?

[Ashley Pond V]

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 8:15 AM, Devin Austin <devin.austin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 6, 2011 at 2:52 PM, Roger Horne <roger at hrothgar.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>> On Sunday 06 March 2011 20:52:04 Devin Austin wrote:
>>
>> > FormFu is pretty awful in my opinion.  Rose::HTML stuff isn't
>> > much better.
>>
>> As an amateur I would be interested to know why.
>>
>> When I started learning about Catalyst about a year ago, the
>> Tutorial at
>>
>
> FormFu doesn't make it easy to do a lot of things.  Things like modifying
> the form after it's been created aren't very easy, and there were quite a
> few instances I had to add these sort of ludicrous call backs (recommended
> in the documentation) to get the functionality I wanted (populate a select
> box from the db, etc.)
> It's kludgy, and there are just better options out there.

I'd like to see a start to finish example of the better options. Your
criticism seems contradictory. You dislike callbacks because you
prefer to write the form in code.

I use FormFu and have no problem with it and there is ultimately no
difference between doing things in config or in code, it's all code
and rendering in the end and HTML forms and form processing is just a
messy business no matter what you do. I find config files a very clean
way to reuse parts of forms and fieldsets and such. Doing that with
Roles or inheritance seems messier to me.

The *only* thing I'm dissatisfied with in FormFu is the speed but
since forms are such a small part of regular app traffic, it hasn't
stopped me from using it. Carl's fast and caring responses to
questions and bugfixes on the FormFu list are part of why I like it.

I have been very curious about other approaches, including FormHandler
but a casual read of the docs gives no compelling reason to switch and
critiquing FormFu ("FormFu is pretty awful in my opinion") without
some kind of comparison/contrast and real examples is not really
helpful.

-Ashley