Supler: Web forms development made easier | Hacker News Reader

Supler: Web forms development made easier

warski.org

50 pointsadamw1pl9 comments

"Functional Reactive" form library?

This buzzword has gotten entirely out of control. Outside of marketing, though, I really like the idea of having a nice DSL for form building. Supler can take a lot of advantage of that.

That's on purpose, of course ;). But it's not only marketing: functional as in preferring immutable data structures, and reactive as in changing the form in response to user input.

Let us know what you think about the DSL itself.

I think the DSL itself is great. I have a project where I'd like to use something like this in anger and I'll revisit when I get to engage on that peoject.

This looks like a well thought-out project, but I am unsure how it would realistically fit into an actual project. It claims that "it does not tie you to a web framework", which I guess is technically true... but the amount of setup involved on the server basically makes this thing its own framework (in terms of having to manage it on the back-end). And if you're already using a framework then it most likely includes its own form generation/processing system.

Seems to me that a more practical "framework-agnostic" form library would be one that is completely on the front-end, and assumes a REST-like API exists on the backend that it can communicate with.

We would be fine using existing frameworks and their form handling systems, but all of them feel very heavyweight. Either the backing objects need to be of some specific form, or the communication protocol between the server and the client is weird, or the generated markup is a mess.

With Supler, we want to make it easy to customise the form, the form's markup and associated Javascript (to add any dynamic behaviour), so that you don't have to hack the framework, but instead so that you can use our library to generate the base and then customise further.

One of the main points of Supler is that it takes care of both the frontend and the backend, so I don't think it would be possible to keep it entirely on the frontend. E.g. you define the form once, and you have partial validation on the frontend, and the same full validation on the backend (without having to repeat yourself).

Reminds me of react-forms[1] a little. Both use immutable data in some way, both have an idea of schema based generation and validation.

I've been wanting to try it in a project but just need the right one. Wonder what server side separation in scala brings that node couldn't.

[1] https://github.com/prometheusresearch/react-forms

Thanks for the pointer, React-forms as well as React this looks very interesting, however I think the focus there is mostly on frontend, while we are trying to approach the problem both on the frotend and backend sides.

Otherwise there are some similarities between the projects.

Misread the title and thought it was about ASP.NET's WebForms, to which I thought, "Wow, something to make it easier? I'll take anything!" ;] (Current client is a major WebForms project, but luckily v4.5.)

Couldn't be much further from that...

Maybe we should target a .NET DSL next then ;)

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