[Catalyst] Fwd: Form.Validator and HTML::Widget

[John Beppu]

[Form.Validator]

Lately, I've been doing some more coding on Form.Validator which is a
Javascript library for doing form validation.  There's an older
version on http://openjsan.org/, but the most up-to-date version has
undergone significant changes.  The main difference is that I
organized the code such that they way you define constraints and the
way you report validation failures is cleanly separated.

In past versions, there was only one way to report validation
failures, and that was by displaying an alert pop-up.  It can still
take that approach, but it can also do real-time validation as you
type like http://rememberthemilk.com/signup .

[The Demo Page]

Please go http://asciicker.kicks-ass.org/x/form_validator_demo.html
and try it out for yourself.  It should now work in Firefox, IE6,
Safari, and Konqueror (and probably Opera, too).

[The AJAX Dilemma]

On the demo page, you'll see a few paragraphs about a problem that
this library has when using AJAX for constraint functions.  If anyone
out there has any ideas on how I can solve this issue, I'd be
interested in hearing your ideas.

[What about HTML::Widget?]

There has been talk about providing client-side validation for
HTML::Widget, and Form.Validator is a possible candidate.  I haven't
used HTML::Widget much, but I have looked through the man page and
skimmed through the code a bit.  All I really need from HTML::Widget
is a way to ask it what its constraints are.  I can then try to
generate Javascript based on that data.  (We'll see how far we can get
with this approach.)

However, for now, I'm writing the Javascript by hand as you can see if
you `view source` on the demo page.

Please check it out, and let me know what you think.  Thanks.