Our application has 16 forms for a total of more than 600 fields and all of them are brilliantly handled by Woody. The logic is entirely driven by Flowscript and persistence needs are handled by Hibernate. JX templates are used for views.
One form, with 160 fields arranged in a series of tabbed pages, was particularly interesting, since we decided that it was better to represent the underlying model as an XML document, instead of creating an SQL table with 160 columns. Using Hibernate, we retrieve an object containing an XML document (stored in a CLOB), set it as the form's model, than we store it back in the db and show the modified document in a view, all using the following code (slightly simplified):
function update(form) {
var session = Persistence.getSession();
var visit = session.load
(Visit, new java.lang.Long(cocoon.request.id));
form.load(visit.document);
form.showForm("forms/create");
form.save(visit.document);
session.update(visit);
cocoon.sendPage("views/read", {
"visit" : visit,
});
}Try to do that in PHP!
Doing all of this with such elegance and simplicity and with such nice-looking results wouldn't have been possible just a year ago, or it would have taken five times as much time to develop. The Flowscript, Woody and the JXTemplateGenerator made us much more productive than we would have been without them. Cocoon is finally reaching maturity as a great Web applications development framework.
So it is with great pleasure that I want to say a big *THANK YOU* to all the people involved in the development of Cocoon, for building such a great platform. I love you.
Ugo
-- http://www.beblogging.com/blog/
