In WebGUI 8 we are deprecating the old WebGUI::Form, WebGUI::HTMLForm, and WebGUI::TabForm. It's time for a more modern approach: WebGUI::FormBuilder.

I've created a preliminary implementation in the "formbuilder" branch of the WebGUI repository.

The skinny:

WebGUI::FormBuilder builds an entire form. Forms are made up WebGUI::FormBuilder::Tabs, WebGUI::FormBuilder::Fieldsets, and Fields (our old WebGUI::Form::Control with some minor additions).

The FormBuilder object will be able to export itself to good old HTML, or to a set of template variables for Template Toolkit, or even to a hash reference for serialization (of course, JSON serialization is just a single toJson() away). The idea here is that the (Data)Form asset is just a configured instance of a FormBuilder object.

Tabs and Fieldsets can also have Fields, Tabs, and Fieldsets inside of them. Deep recursion is possible, if you want tabs inside of fieldsets inside of fieldsets inside of tabs inside of fieldsets, FormBuilder will not stop you (but I may whack you upside the head). The adding of different objects to Forms, Tabs, and Fieldsets are implemented as Roles, so that new Form object can be implemented quickly (dialogs perhaps?).

Tabs, Fieldsets, and even whole Forms can also be added to other Forms, so you can combine two Forms on-the-fly and then display the result to the user. Name conflicts are, of course, completely up to the programmer to resolve (since they're impossible to predict), but FormBuilder will have mechanisms to make it easy.

Finally, FormBuilder forms will parse the form's results and give them to you as a hashref. No more messing about with the four different arguments to WebGUI::FormValidator (though the option will remain, of course).

This is a very preliminary implementation. I've also attached the specification document I've been working on/from.

Questions, comments, arguments, or feature requests are welcome.