I've been coding web and mobile apps for 12 years and I've worked on countless forms. It seems like there should exist a formal way to define them (field names, data types, validation, endpoints, etc.), compatible with backend and frontend languages. Then a library, in each given language to render the form. Anyway, I'd like to define a form once and render it or process it without any extra work. Do any hackers know of such a thing?
I've seen several decent implementations based on <a href="https://json-schema.org/implementations.html#web-ui-generation" rel="nofollow">https://json-schema.org/implementations.html#web-ui-generati...</a><p>Json schema also has many tools for validation, which is nice if you're passing the form data around.
I ended up creating my own, in yaml, with rails backend.<p>Includes multiple nested field sets, fields shown/activated by other fields etc.<p>The gist is: structure in yaml/json, then field code templates in partials, and validations on the back end. Included Salesforce list validations which was pretty neat.<p>The code is nowhere near reusable unfortunately.
This might not be exactly what you’re looking for — it’s meant more for interactive editorial features than simple forms — but Idyll looks really cool and is worth a look.<p><a href="https://idyll-lang.org/" rel="nofollow">https://idyll-lang.org/</a>
I once started inventing such a thing called FORMCARD, which supports paper forms as well as computer, and also includes transport protocol to submit the forms, as well as the file format to describe the form, but not much has been done with that since then.