Home5 month anniversary
The Form Assembly’s 5 month anniversary is closing in, and I must say, I’m quite impressed and happy with the success this site has encountered.
Over 1200 users have registered, thousands more have been able to use the Form Builder anonymously and close to 6700 forms have been created so far.
wForms, the open-source javascript library behind some of the cool features offered by the Form Builder, has been translated in 10 languages and has been through 11 revisions, thanks to the help and feedback from many users. In all modesty, it probably has become the best and most robust javascript library for web forms.
The Form Garden has received less attention and I’ve neglected it a bit, but I’ll try to add more stylesheets to the 7 already there. If you’d like to contribute CSS stylesheets to the garden but don’t know how to get started, drop me an email, I’ll help you out.
So, thanks to you all, your comments and encouragements have all been really helpful.
Keep them coming. I’d love to hear what features you’d like to see added to the Form Assembly.
Form Builder, Web Development, Ajax
August 27th, 2005 at 11:17 pm
Hi,
>”I’d love to hear what features you’d like to see added to the Form Assembly.”
I would like to be able to integrate the Form Builder too in my application, not just the generated forms received per e-mail. This procedure involves too much ‘developer interaction’ to get the forms the final application.
Having Form Buider in a donwload from, would allow a better integration and more usage of wForms in many applications.
In most cases, not developers make the forms, but ‘users’.
Thanks,
Klaus.
August 29th, 2005 at 12:21 am
Klaus, you’re right about the ‘users’ making the forms. I’m planning to add new user-oriented features soon that will make it easy, not ony to create, but to host forms and process responses.
Regarding integrating the Form Builder in another application, I’ve been considering similar requests on a case-by-case basis so far. You can ermail me with the details of your project if you want.
September 1st, 2005 at 1:34 pm
Hi Cédric,
Thanks a lot for your work, it’s great to use it.
I just want to ask you 2 questions to have your opinion on this subject :
what do you think about this functionnality http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/usableforms.html and also the framework prototype.js used by http://script.aculo.us/ and http://openrico.org/rico/home.page ? Don’t you think it would be interesting to have a common structure for all that javascript code so that it could be homogeneous and offers great functionnalities ?
Thanks for your answer
Sébastien
September 1st, 2005 at 8:06 pm
Salut Sébastien,
Good questions. I have 2 issues with Peter-Paul Koch’s script on quirksmode.org. First it works only with forms with a table-based layout, but more importantly, it uses non-standard attributes. This approach makes it less future-proof (I suspect it breaks with pages served has application/xml+xhtml).
Prototype.js looks interesting, but has zero documentation available so far.. Also, I don’t think it supports as many browsers as wForms does. It also relies on the innerHtml property, which doesn’t work in Firefox/Mozilla in ‘XML’ mode (application/xml+xhtml mime type).
Now, I agree that it would be nice to find and extract some common patterns in all these scripts. wForms is ripe for a refactoring and I’ll be willing to provide some ’standard’ interfaces.. I just don’t know which ones yet.
On a side note, wForms can live happily beside prototype.js. It uses unobtrusive javascript and shouldn’t mess up any 3rd party code.
September 1st, 2005 at 10:29 pm
Thanks so much for your quick answer. That’s funny to speak english between to frenchies. My wife would be proud of me (she’s american, living in Paris and bored of speaking french with me all the time ;o) ).
That’s for sure that your scripts work with any other script because I’m using a lot of them now
) !
For documentation about prototype.js, you have : http://wiki.script.aculo.us/scriptaculous/show/Prototype and http://www.sergiopereira.com/articles/prototype.js.html.
For Peter-Paul Koch’s script, you can use it with DIV without any problem. For its non-standard attributes, I was thinking about that and maybe a solution with the way you use the “class” attribute.
Because of you, I’m far better in JS and DOM now than ever.
Sébastien
September 1st, 2005 at 10:52 pm
> Prototype.js looks interesting, but has zero documentation available so far.
Here:
http://wiki.script.aculo.us/scriptaculous/show/Prototype
is a pretty good documentation.
Klaus.
September 2nd, 2005 at 4:38 am
Okay, I withdraw my comment about ‘zero’ documentation
I’ll give it a second look.
September 13th, 2005 at 9:31 pm
hi, for some reason, I cannot create an account.
September 30th, 2005 at 12:09 am
Just found this site, and FormBuilder is an awesome piece of work. It’s a common-sense project in one sense, but from what I see so far, I’m amazed that you’ve taken time to do it so well and make it available for folks like me.
But on a desired feature - how about the ability to create custom field validations- and even save them in a library to share?
September 30th, 2005 at 12:31 am
Another request: what if you offered a download (or purchase) version that’s basically just like your website. I could see installing it on a web server, then saving forms with it, then somehow “including” those forms in pages on the website. Anyone could make changes to the forms, and the change would be instantly reflected on the site. Of course, one could perhaps do the same thing with forms hosted on your server. That might be even better in some respects - although a few details would pose different challenges (perhaps you’re already thinking through that).
September 30th, 2005 at 3:06 am
Jonathan, yep I’m actually working on it. The form builder will not be downloadable, but the Form Assembly will offer a form hosting and processing service. More details soon.
October 3rd, 2005 at 11:53 am
how can you talk about “Standard compliance” and then have form builder (and your site in general for that matter) not work in any version of Safari?
October 3rd, 2005 at 8:04 pm
Sebastian, the Form Builder *generates* standard compliant web forms (XHTML, CSS and Javascript) that work in any browser, including Safari.
The fact that the Form Builder itself doesn’t work with Safari (or Opera) is not a W3C standard compliance issue. The Builder requires a scriptable XSLT processor, which is missing in these browsers.
I’ve not given up on Safari, but for now, you can use Firefox or Camino on a Mac.
October 5th, 2005 at 1:53 pm
Hi Cédric !
I asked you here some questions few weeks ago about Peter-Paul Koch’s script and you gave that answer:
“Good questions. I have 2 issues with Peter-Paul Koch’s script on quirksmode.org. First it works only with forms with a table-based layout, but more importantly, it uses non-standard attributes. This approach makes it less future-proof (I suspect it breaks with pages served has application/xml+xhtml).”
And I found an answer of Peter-Paul Koch : http://www.alistapart.com/articles/scripttriggers
What do you think about that ?
And what is your point of view now about prototype.js and the fact that having a big client-side JS framework could be very interesting ( prototype for the basis, openrico, script.aculo.us, jscalendar and form assembly above ) for a powerful RIA architecture based on XHTML+CSS+JS and anything we want on the server side (like a light http://www.bindows.net but nicer
) ?
October 5th, 2005 at 7:09 pm
this is really amazing stuff
i work in the pharmaceutical sector, in clinical trials. these trials consist of collecting tons of data through forms. at the moment most companies use paper forms.
more and more companies are starting to use electronic data capture applications. these are often heavy pieces of propietary software that are difficult to install on a surgeon’s workstation, with all kinds of bugs and incompatibilities.
i have made some forms with MS Infopath which outputs an xml file which is then fed into a database. however i would *love* to use something like this, for reasons of cost and compatibility.
feeding the output into a db will require quite a bit of programming skills i take it. any pointers would be appreciated
October 6th, 2005 at 3:17 am
Seb,
The discussion on the ALA article pretty much sums up the debate on the ‘custom attribute’ issue. In wForms I avoided the problem by using the semantically neutral, and HTML valid, class attribute. For an approach similar to Koch’s, but with valid markup, check out ultraviolet. It has more validation options than wForms (but works in less browsers).
Regarding the integration with other frameworks, in the Time-Tracker I use wForms and Prototype and Scriptaculous. The problem is that often I need only a small subset of what these scripts do.. I haven’t spent much time looking at the other frameworks.
October 6th, 2005 at 3:20 am
Ajax-ified Weblog
Update: This code hasn’t been revised to work with the latest version of prototype.js (1.3.1) So, there’s this “new” technology on the web that’s all the rage. Except that it’s not really new, it’s been around for a while. People have just start…
October 6th, 2005 at 9:13 am
Great stuff! Thanks for your work on this project.
As to suggestions, I second the previous poster’s request for a library of common field validations (telephone, honorific, zip code, etc.).
October 6th, 2005 at 5:51 pm
Thanks for the link, it’s very interesting. I will also have a look at your time tracker to see it.
October 10th, 2005 at 4:34 am
Cedric,
I would like your feedback on how webforms are connected to databases. The use case that I am trying to solve for includes collecting data on webforms,
storing the data in a database and then creating reports off of the data in the database. How would I do this with webforms?
Thanks!
Dave
P.S. I am extremely impressed with this application.
October 10th, 2005 at 4:35 am
Cedric,
One other question, can I do cross form validation on webforms?
October 14th, 2005 at 9:49 am
Dave… forms created with the Form Builder are like any other web forms. To process data and store them in a database you need some server-side programming and a database. The question is to large to be answered here, but you should start by figuring out what server-side programming language is available to you (PHP, ASP, Cold-Fusion..) and then search sites like www.w3schools.com for more information.
This is assuming you actually want to learn how the whole thing works. Now if you are only interested in having data going to a database and getting reports, I encourage you to come back in a few weeks when the version 2.0 of this site will be unveiled. You’ll find the service you need.
PS: I’m not sure I understand what you mean by ‘cross form validation’ ?