[html-formfu] FormFu observations

[xaos at darksmile.net]

Hello everyone,

After using FormFu for the past 4 months, I'd like to share with you  
some of my observations.

Starting with FormFu was a bit of a learning curve, mainly because of  
the lack of extended examples. This is not a complaint but just an  
observation. FormFu is well written and you can tell that Carl and the  
other Contributors have worked hard to kill bugs (I haven't seen any  
yet) and this is their priority.

It is up to the rest of us to provide more detailed documentation and  
I have since posted some code and I will be posting much more (soon)  
in order to help in this regard.

Once I got over the initial 2-3 week period, I was ok. Most of the  
time now I just go directly to the source and see what's going on. I  
know this is wrong,
but I can't really say anything negative about doing it this way. It  
is what it is. I am thankful for formfu that works well.

If you want real good looking forms you MUST use javascript along with formfu!
There is no way around this. Nowdays people expect web pages to be  
fully interactive not just static HTML.

For instance, I use javascript to fully qualify a form even before the  
user presses "submit". It just takes too long to actually submit to  
server and get back any errors. It feels sluggish.

So, since my forms are all pre-processed on the front end, you would  
think that maybe I should abandon FormFu altgether?

Well, absolutely not! YAML is much easier to work with than raw HTML.  
I do not want to give that up.

And then there is the concept of form re-use. My HTML tree has a form  
directory which has dirs for every page but also a "Library" dir for  
shared forms. Without YAML this is not possible.

So, using FormFu, Javascript, jQuery (Absolute MUST. Don't ever code  
Javascript without it!!!), AJAX, MySQL and Apache I have designed some  
awsome pages using forms.

If you didn't see that it was running under Firefox you would think  
that my pages are C code native to the playform.

Thank you all for your efforts on FormFu.

Regards,

George H.