Webformer: A Rapid Application Development Toolkit For Writing Ajax Web Form Applications

Web forms are commonly used to capture data on the web. With Asynchronous Javascript and XML (Ajax) programming, interactive web forms can be created. However, Ajax programming is complex in a way that the model-view-controller (MVC) code is not clearly separated. This paper discusses about a MVC-oriented web form development called "Webformer" that we develop to simplify and streamline web form development with Ajax. We introduce a scripting language called Web Form Application Language (WebFAL) for modeling web forms. Webformer hides the programming complexity by generating Ajax code directly from the web form models.