Real men write their own forms (or do they?)

I have to admit that I'm kind of a - dare I say - diva - when it comes to forms. I prefer to type them out and do all the validation by hand. In the past I've written form 'helpers' to handle generating and validating forms (*), but I haven't done that for quite some time. I feel like I've written a few million forms in my life time, and I'm sure I'll write a few million more.

This week a coworker introduced me to WuFoo. WuFoo is an online form service. As you can guess, it lets you build forms and host them on their server. It handles storing and processing all the results.

What is truly slick is how they handle all the editing. Everything is drag drop, so to add a form field you simply drag over the type of form field you need. You can then double click on the field to edit the label, set requirement status, etc.

It has a slick reporting UI as well. I can build a form with a radio button and design a form that uses a pie chart to display the results.

When would I use this? Probably never as I know I can whip out a quick form in a few seconds. But for folks who don't have access to Me (I'm not cheap ;) or may not even have a web site, this is sweet service.

Feel free to play with the form I created.

Comments (8) Apr 24, 2008 11:36 AM Views: 1066

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Now you almost got me. I was reading your statmemnt and go to "When would I use this? Probably never as I know I can whip out a quick ..." when I eyes got real wide because I just knew the next words were going to be "... CFC to let me do this in ColdFusion."
# Posted By Gary Funk | 4/24/08 12:21 PM
I've been using the Uniform Custom Tag library by Matt Quackenbush to easily create consistent, accessible forms that are easily skinned.


Have a look: http://www.quackfuzed.com/index.cfm/2007/12/16/Col...
# Posted By Dan Wilson | 4/24/08 12:28 PM
I haven't used it, but you could checkout cf_sebForm (http://www.bryantwebconsulting.com/blog/).

"The cf_sebForm custom tag simplifies development of simple forms. It separates logic and display, integrates with CFCs, and manages validation. The output is unobtrusive and skinnable."
# Posted By Steve Walker | 4/24/08 1:17 PM
As an aside, note I used * in the blog entry. I had meant to add the following as a PS.

Back in my Perl days, I built a few standard libraries. I used a common naming scheme that I brought into my early CF days.

Every app was named somethingGod.

So my form code was FormGod.

SIlly - I dn't know what I Was thinking.
# Posted By Raymond Camden | 4/24/08 1:23 PM
"I have to admin that I'm kind of"

shouldn't it be "I have to admit that I'm kind of"? :)
# Posted By tony petruzzi | 4/24/08 1:31 PM
Can I pretend I meant that?
# Posted By Raymond Camden | 4/24/08 2:00 PM
Even if you don't use WuFoo for actually constructing a form, I love it for helping with the skinning of forms. There are a bunch of pretty cool themes to choose from, and it's nice to see something like an end result of color combinations before actually diving into coding it.
# Posted By Joel Watson | 4/24/08 5:05 PM
This one is pretty good too, in PHP: http://www.phpform.org/

There's also a CF one believe it or not, 'cause I wrote it a while back but not launched to public. :)
# Posted By Henry | 4/25/08 10:21 AM
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