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 (wink) (ooh - but we got production code running already (wink)

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