I've been working on a new project that integrates with Cinemon these past few work-days. The first day was pretty much taken up with factoring the common code out of Cinemon that I want to use with the new project. That's all the web-site and application setup stuff that's really pretty generic "I want an SSL-encrypted web-services-providing master-template driven site with PostgreSQL-based authentication and preference-holding user 'avatars'" boilerplate.

Then I sat down to start work and ran into the form problem. Whether to hand-code every form (ick), use formless (dying) or formal (still very early in its life cycle and a bit overkill-ish, seems to require almost as much effort as hand coding in many cases). Or whether to code my own. After many hours of playing with the approaches and paper-testing alternates it seems as though for an application like this, where we really only have 15 or 20 "screens" that it's just as reasonable to hand-code as to use (or build) a framework.

It's not that formal is particularly difficult, but it's still basically undocumented and very early in its life cycle. It also seems a might too structured in its approach. I would prefer to have the ability to simply describe the fields and define "onField" handlers to deal with individual field values and "onForm" handlers (pre and post) to deal with whole-form issues. I'd like to be able to use those for both Ajax and form-post operation.

Anyway, it's getting late, so I guess I'll have to head off to bed now. Tomorrow we'll be publishing the VoIP project to the staging server (yay!). Probably spend the remainder of the day on VoIP project tickets to try to get those which are launch blockers beaten into submission before the LinuxWorld conference bleeds away for 3 person-days.