Just like to share my real world experience with Manuel Lemos' "formsgeneration" library. http://www.phpclasses.org/formsgeneration
At work early this summer we had a project under a tight deadline that needed unified form creation, processing, and error reporting. I had seen Manuel promoting his formsgeneration class on the mailing list and thought I'd look into it to help keep the project within the deadline. I read some positive reviews and comments, the demos looked promising, and the interface seemed good enough. Little did I know the headaches I was in for. I found the configuration structures and interface to be extremely cumbersome, not to mention terribly documented. The interface seems quite inefficient and in most cases its easier just to throw together a form and validation code by hand. Usage was often convoluted, and due to the poor documentation I spent half my effort trying to decipher the interface. And it was difficult to customize in several areas. While it can work well enough in several simple cases, in my opinion it is too cumbersome for any significant form processing project, especially in the business world. I ended up wasting a week of work using the formsgeneration class and had to redo the project making my own form utility code from scratch as I went (which took just as much time and actually worked as intended). Granted I did make the mistake of not giving myself enough evaluation time before the project. I just want caution others to carefully evaluate this code before deciding to use it in their projects, especially since Manuel seems so eager to promote his code (and his web site) whenever the opportunity arises. And in general, to be cautious and take your time when evaluating any 3rd party code for production use. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
