I personally like the features of Cocoon Forms and the easy flow with
continuations, but I see the problem of two many files for a single form as
well. And if you don't need continuations then the advantages of Cforms melt...
One of the key concepts of CForms is to be output-format neutral: so it
could be HTML (Forms) and... ehm... wait... XForms... And that's the problem
when you only work with HTML (and I'd be interested to hear if someone doing
something else) - the overall "pipeline" gets very long:
Flowscript
Data (maybe XML)
Form Binding (standard/Java code)
Form Definition (XML)
Form Template (XML with a bit of HTML)
Form Instance (XML - you don't write it, but you need to know it for
matching in the stylesheets below)
form2html standard stylesheet (XSL)
form2html custom stylesheet
(some html2html general stylesheet for your app)
So if you care about your user interface and want to tweak the HTML code
that gets produced, you have quite a hard time figuring out how to write
your form2html custom stylesheet. And often I sit there and have to think
quite a while to make the decision where to put stuff. For example you often
put HTML into the form template - but sometimes this could be put into the
form2html as well.
And finally I practically see little value in splitting definition and
template - the cases where you re-use your definition in multiple templates
are very very few - and that's the only reason for the split up AFAIK, apart
from general abstraction of the data model. But you probably have two data
model abstractions anyway: in your Java code and/or in your database scheme.
Ok, enough rant, continuations, validation, javascript action handlers and
ajax on/off are very good features ;-)
Alex
--
Alexander Klimetschek
http://www.mindquarry.com
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