Airform: Functional HTML forms for front-end developers | Hacker News Reader

Airform: Functional HTML forms for front-end developers

airform.io

72 pointscjpatoilo47 comments

What if you could use a service that gives you full control over the form, yet doesn’t require you to use anything on your server? Airform gives you the ability to create functional HTML forms without thinking about servers.

After 2 years and thousands of submissions, I am very happy to introduce Airform to the world. It's available on https://airform.io effective immediately.

What's next?

Support for JavaScript frameworks like React, Vue, Angular, and Angular.js

Help users with interactive F.A.Q. page

In Firefox 75.0b4 on Mac, the code in the example shows up all on one line. In Chrome it looks right.

Code is in one line in Safari as well.

I wonder why Safari has been deviating from Blink a lot lately or is Blink moving too fast?

Given that the problem also apparently happens with Firefox, perhaps the latter?

I meant by that Blink forked out of webkit which is Safari's engine. Gecko is a different code base.

I had a similar idea, but doesn't this mean they store and can view the content of form submissions?

I don't understand, are they just selling completely vanilla HTML forms? What's the product here?

> Airform turns complex HTML forms into simple calls.

a.k.a a POST request? a.k.a how all forms already work today... it's already language agnostic.

I believe they're providing the back end infrastructure that receives that processing that POST request. Maybe they store it in some DB and you can retrieve the data later on via an API call or something?

Seems the form's action goes to their backend and you also include your email in that url, so seems to be a "form submission > email" service.

Would look like this:

  <input type="text" name="name" placeholder="Enter your name">

  <textarea name="message" placeholder="Enter your message"></textarea>

  <button>Send</button>

</form>

Ahhh. In that case, Google also has a version of this that writes to Google sheets: https://www.google.com/forms/about/

Our HR and accounting ppl use it regularly.

I'd prefer this Google option my self.

I have so many questions lol

Some mpre constructive feedback people? Sure the page lacks some examples but many comments here are deeply disappointing.

Remember doing an OSS project is extremely taxing, dealing with naysayers at all stages of development, impostor syndrome, lack of confidence and just general fatigue.

Please show some respect and show the creators, tinkerers and developers of HN some appreciation and encouragement.

The page writes that its an open source solution, but it looks like the github repo only contains the frontend code, not the backend? I'd love to be proven wrong here, cause this looks like a useful service if I can run it on my own VM.

Looks nice. A few years back my friend and I built formbucket.com to solve the same problem, and we quickly found out that keeping a lid on spam is a big challenge. How are you planning to deal with that?

reCAPTCHA?

Yes that can work fine for certain low-value/low-volume forms, but it's a bad UX to effectively put spam mitigation on your users.

It should really be handled on the backend (e.g. using https://akismet.com/development/api/).

recaptcha v3 works invisibly in the background. There's buttons or pictures or anything.

https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/docs/v3

Neat! Been a while since I have been in the forms "world" and looked at recaptcha, thanks for sharing.

Goodbye privacy. (Even more than normal)

Yes, it's neat in the sense of seamless (privacy violation) integration.

Invisible if you have the full suite of tracking cookies.

Not if you use Safari.

What problem is being solved here, exactly?

You are developing a static site and don't have a backend to process form submissions. A hosted endpoint solves that problem.

Is a Lambda/Cloud Function/etc. really so complicated?

While you can probably also find people like car mechanics that wonder why people think changing a V-belt is so complicated, this type of arrogance seems to be more prevalent among programmers.

Levels.fyi still relies on Google Form for submissions. It's just as simple and requires no backend. It also nicely populates a Google Sheet. Airform looks great but the Google Sheet functionality was essential for us. There's a good tutorial here: https://blog.webjeda.com/google-form-customize/

Do you work at levels.fyi? Maybe you can explain why those salary numbers don't match any company I've ever worked for. :P

Yes I'm a co-founder. Can you email me the company at hello <at> levels <dot> fyi? FWIW we take accuracy very seriously. We just released an email list for receiving verified salaries: https://www.levels.fyi/verified/

I've been using this service for years: https://formspree.io/ -- they do a decent job of preventing spam as well.

Are we really starting to sell forms as a service? Another data grab service.

Netlify Forms is another alternative:

https://www.netlify.com/products/forms/

https://docs.netlify.com/forms/setup/

I’ve been happy with it. They have spam filtering which mostly works.

Yes I believe they use Akismet:

https://akismet.com/

This is about 2 days away from being shut down as a spam relay.

Nice idea, but I see no pricing. How will you support the service?

It parses a x-www-form-urlencoded POST call and sends it to an E-mail? Or am I completely wrong about what it does?

Building a registration form for our business and was surprised to discover there's an entire industry (maybe?) of Form Submission as a Service providers. (Personally, I'm trying out formspree.io--which accepts AJAX submissions and/or file uploads)

It takes about 20 min and minimal technical abilities to set up a Google App Script attached to a Sheet which can accept a POST and do literally anything with the submitted data. Obvious is to save it to the Sheet but you can also tap into Gmail and email results anywhere you like. Works with any free Gmail account as well as GSuite accounts. Search for Google App Script doPost - which is a built-in event handler that will accept POSTs once you publish as a web app and grant the proper permissions. Use the published URL as your form's action handler. All for free.

I see no spam mitigation measure (captcha, honeypot). Am I missing something?

What happens to the submitted form data?

Great question. You will never know what is done with the data if you're using servers you don't control. That's why I thought the intro was fake at first. That's the literal exact opposite of what I want. I only clicked there link because it said "functional". I'm a little disappointed.

You are working with sensative data but there is no privacy statement.

Is this somekind of test to spam HN submissions?

Is this a joke?

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