Wicked Forms

Showcase

To view the showcase app, follow these steps:

• clone the repo
• run ./gradlew build (or gradlew.bat build on Windows)
• drop the WAR file from the folder wicked-forms-showcase-wicket7/build/libs into a Tomcat's webapp dir (you might want to rename it to showcase.war)
• open localhost:8080/<NAME_OF_THE_WAR> in your browser

Include in Gradle build

To include wicked-forms in your Gradle build, add the following to your build.gradle

repositories {
  jcenter()
}

dependencies {
  compile "de.adesso:wicked-forms-wicket-6:1.0.0-BETA" // when using Wicket 6
  compile "de.adesso:wicked-forms-wicket-7:1.0.0-BETA" // when using Wicket 7
}

Why dynamic forms?

Wicked Forms is a Java library you can use to create dynamic forms in your Java web applications (more specifically with Apache Wicket). A static form is a form that is defined once and cannot change it's structure whereas a dynamic form is a form that can be defined at runtime.

Use cases for dynamic forms include the following:

• Rapid Prototyping: if you use Java Persistence API (JPA) for your database-driven web application you could process the JPA annotations and create dynamic forms for each of your entities to rapidly create CRUD functionality (Create, Update, Delete). As a bonus, you may want to add Bean Validation support to these forms. A JPA annotation processor is part of the roadmap of Wicked Forms (see issue 1 and issue 2).
• User-Defined Forms: any use case that requires a user to define a form to be filled out by other users is a use case for dynamic forms. An application where a user may create questionnaires or surveys to be filled out by other users is an example. Wicked Forms provides all form input components you might need to create questionnaires.
• Wizards: some forms may not need to be wholly user-defined but need to be configurable to a certain extent nonetheless. Such forms include wizards in which the second form changes it's input fields depending on the input the user has entered in the first form.
• Form-Based Communication Protocols: if two applications need to exchange form-based data (i.e. structured data that has been entered by a user, for example in XML), dynamic forms are needed to display this data in a form to another user in the target application. An example of this has already been implemented as a showcase for the German XVergabe standard. See http://www.wicked-forms.org/wicked-forms-showcase-xvergabe.
• Laziness: software developers are lazy by profession. Thus, you can let Wicked Forms create your forms for you without the hassle of programming client-side validation, accessibility features, HTML5 input fields and CSS classes.

Planned Features of Wicked Forms

• modelling of dynamic forms with pure Java
• all default input components available (text fields, radio buttons, checkboxes, ...)
• custom input components can be added
• HTML5 form elements and thus automatic client-side validation
• accessible forms
• reasonably nice default design
• overridable design (CSS, HTML)