Albatross Forms Overview
Albatross Forms provides support for developing Albatross applications which gather data from the user, validate it, and then return the user's data to the app. Much of this work is mechanical and it's tedious and error prone writing the same code on different pages in the application.
Using Forms lets the developer organise the presentation of related data on a web page programmatically. The Forms support handles the basic layout, type conversions and validation as the user interacts with the form. By using centrally defined data types, presentation, validation and error reporting can be done consistently and modified easily. It's been our experience that development is much faster and lots of code can be removed from the Albatross templates where it's hard to read, difficult to test and gets mucked up by web designers using DreamWeaver.
Albatross Forms is designed to use CSS to change the layout of the forms when they are displayed rather than encoding the HTML into the form tags. This consolidates the web site's presentation and makes it easier to change the presentation globally.
The form support will be offered in the module albatross.ext.form, though we're still arguing about where it will end up.