RE: [Webware-discuss] FormKit

[Paul B. <pa...@in...>]

> At 03:18 AM 12/8/2000 +0000, Tripp Lilley wrote:
>
> >Chuck, when you're working on FormKit, you might want to look at this
> >for ideas. No clue whether or not they'll be good ideas :) Anyway, they
> >use an XML format to specify the forms, validation rules, etc. You
> >should also take a peek at XFDL, the eXtensible Forms Description
> >Language. It's a really shitty XML format for doing forms, but it's got
> >the W3C stamp of approval, and isn't limited to web work.
> >
> >         http://freshmeat.net/projects/formmagick/
>
> Thanks for the note. Pretty scary that I just opened up my FormKit
> source files to continue work on it right before this msg arrived and
> possibly while you were composing it.

I've just joined the list, but I saw this in the archives. In the early days of
Webware, I was busy developing my own tools and frameworks for CGI-like Web
development, and I was fairly interested in structured data handling with Web
forms.

Anyway, I have recently been working on an XForms [1] handler for Webware 0.4.1
which attempts to read in and structure form data according to XForms
definitions. What currently happens is that I register a handler for documents
with the suffix ".xform" and when Webware receives a request for a resource with
that suffix, my handler reads the definition of the same name as the resource
from the filesystem, then it attempts to structure any incoming form data
according to that definition before handing over control to a resource whose
name is defined as the "action" in the XForm definition.

Pictorally, it looks like this:

  --[data]--> resource.xform --[structured data]--> action

Here, action could be anything that Webware supports, since my handler just
forwards the request to another servlet. So, you could use XForms definitions
with PSP, for example, although I haven't tried that yet.

Anyway, that's what I have been up to. Is anyone up for it? ;-)

Regards,

Paul

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/WD-xforms-datamodel-20000406/