Posted by Kenneth Downs on 08/09/06 15:45

Chung Leong wrote:

> Richard Levasseur wrote:
>>
>> To be honest, I've yet to find a good forms class that lets me do
>> things the way i want without to much hassle.
>
> People have tried and tried. The approach is fundamentally flawed. A
> solution that's highly structural in nature simply will not work for a
> problem that isn't.

You put it better than I could. Terry Pratchett had a creature in one of
his books called a "drome". It could catch you by trapping you in a waking
dream. In the dream there would be much food, which you would eat and eat
and eat while starving to death because of course it was just a dream.
Then the drome ate you after you died.

Object-oriented forms frameworks appear to me to be the drome. They catch
you with a dream and you starve to death (lost productivity and billing)
eating the imaginary food (silver bullet of perfect programs).

All this being said, there is much value in having library routines that
handle repetitive tasks or make your code more readable. We have found
that simple routines like "hSpan($content)" make code readable, while
comprehensive routines like "hInputsFromTable($table_id)" that create a
complete set of form inputs are also very useful. But structuring it all
into a nested hierarchy of objects just adds more labor with no payoff.

Ken's $.02.

--
Kenneth Downs
Secure Data Software, Inc.
(Ken)nneth@(Sec)ure(Dat)a(.com)

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