Online Service Creates Standard-Compliant Web Forms

JavaScriptSearch
Tuesday, July 18, 2006; 05:34 AM

The FormAssembly.com website offers several types of services for building and using web forms.  Web developers can use Form Assembly to freely create and customize forms, use the paid hosting and processing service, or peruse the provided open source JavaScript code libraries at the their leisure.  In effect, the site can be used as a tool for creating online questionnaires and working with the information they provide.

Probably most appealing to a beginner web developer, or a professional in a hurry, are the free web form creation and customization services: the Form Builder, the Form Garden, and the Form Library.  The Form Builder (screenshot) can create elaborate forms via a web-based interface; users can create custom forms or select preformatted ones for things like names and addresses.  The Form Garden allows for changing the style of forms, and the Library is a collection of existing templates.  All forms are standard-compliant.

The Form Builder.

Additionally, the site offers three plans for hosting forms, called Free, Pas-As-You-Go, and Subscription.  The Free plan is ad-supported, while the Subscription plan is $9 per month and offers advanced features like secure forms and file uploads. Pas-As-You-Go is billed according to the number of visitors.  All plans integrate processing of the hosted forms.  Responses to the online forms can be forwarded by email or delivered as an RSS feed.  Statistics and charts are provided.

Finally, Form Assembly offers access to two JavaScript libraries that enhance web forms. The first, wForms, is a collection of scripts that add commonly needed behaviors to traditional web forms : form validation, conditional questions, repeatable sections, etc.  The second, called Freja, is for adding AJAX to web forms for additional usability and interactivity. 

Started in March 2005, this service has become a popular resource for web form creation and data capture, with thousands of users and tens of thousands of web forms created.