Sylvain's mini-talk at the GT2003 Hackathon.

Raw notes taken collaboratively during the talk.

Sylvain taking the stage

History of form handling

• FormValidatorAction
• Precept & XMLForm
  • Precept kinda died
  • XMLForm ended up being hyped
    • Could handle repetition (of widgets / fields)
    • XPath limitation for serious datatyping (like Dates)
    • quite a lot of code for serious forms (Get/Set)
      

Woody approach

• Schema for datamodel definition
• Validation rules are built-in per datatype
• Repeaters ease the creation of multiline, multifield forms
• Binding definitions ease bidirectional data exchange between the model and the forms
• Form model resides server-side (no dynamic XPath expression stuff going on, avoids security problems)
• WoodyTransformer uses form definition + form template to generate a synthetic "form view" which can be processed independently of Woody to create the required (HTML, WML, PDF, you name it) presentation.
• WoodyTransformer and/or JXTemplateTransformer: which one should you choose?
• Styling stylesheets: use the provided ones or brew your own.
  

Open issues

• Multi-page forms are currently missing. Sylvain thinks this will be implemented with Flowscript "wizards" which will register steps, instead of being Woody's concern.
• Some worries expressed by a lot of people: the necessity of convergence - having only one 'endorsed' form handling framework
• Name discussion: we are considering to throw away the name and rename it into "Cocoon Forms"

(antonio) that is a good idea. But woody is cool too. Think in the woody woodpecker

• Lack of dynamic forms or binding
• Event dispatchers / event queue
• Best practices
• High-level widgets (like existing calendar)
• Client-side validation?
• Possible integration of Linotype editor component as a Woody widget
  

Interesting sidetrack

• Idea (Upa): moving Woody into the core - a discussion ensues about "What is the Core?"
  • idea: everything which leaves a 'footprint' in the sitemap
  • distinction: 'core' and 'basic' - Woody might be a candidate to be moved into basic
    

Sylvain is very enthusiastic about Woody, we're looking forward to his presentation of tomorrow (he promised to show us a "Hello Woody World" for people who haven't been able to catch up with this yet (ooh - but we got production code running already