Web Form Design - How to speed up?

Question

Hey all,

I am just going to be honest and say that I hate building web forms. I am a programmer, not a designer but frequently get stuck building input forms for various web applications. I would really like to find a utility for doing this in a more visual manner. The problem I have found in the past with products like this (cough cough Dreamweaver! cough cough) is that they kick out such awful code that you spend nearly as much time cleaning up the code as you would writing it.

So my needs are: something to greatly expedite form building and design while still maintaing the integrity of the code. Does such an application exist? OSX applications preferred, but I would still be interested to know about things on the Windows side.

The answer to the question could very well save my sanity.

Thank you.

Answer 1

If you are willing to add a dependency to a massive expensive JS lib, then Ext Designer is pretty cool.

Answer 2

Have you explored the possibility of moving some of these apps towards MVC? It can assist quite a bit in generating forms for basic CRUD, and MVC2 adds further templating support.

For example, say you want a View (page) which edits your Customer Model (business-object). You can use the HTML Helper EditorForModel() to generate the full Form. The default HTML is bare-bones, but with templates and customization you can get a fairly rich generated Form from very little code.

Also, consider alternative View Engines for MVC. The default MVC View Engine looks like WebForms to a degree (your .aspx files will be littered with <%= %> tags), but others can provide a lot of syntactical sugar to the markup.