Forms, Workflow, and the Web
By Tom Spitzer
My company provides products and services to support the development of user interfaces for business applications for the Web. Our early efforts developing PC accounting software in the '80s were to emulate preprinted forms as the user interface for entering invoices, purchase orders, returned merchandise authorizations, and checks. Our software began its life as a character-mode application written in dBASE, so entry screens were functional but had nowhere near the detail of preprinted forms.
In the early '90s, we experimented with electronic forms tools, hooking them up to server-side databases that incorporated business logic in their stored procedures. These products, with names like PerformPro, FormEasy, and JetForm, had been introduced to enable institutions that relied heavily on forms processing -- insurance companies, banks, and government agencies -- to automate some of that processing. Vendors introduced these products to support legal and record-keeping requirements rather than to provide tools for developing general-purpose user interfaces. As a result, we never incorporated them into our product-development tool sets, opting instead for general-purpose tools like Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, and Visual FoxPro. Recently we recalled that experience as we struggled to buy or build an effective user interface for designing forms-oriented Web applications.
Then Came the Web
Ever since the emergence of the Web, with its simple <FORM> tag supported by CGI programming, people have built relatively simple forms applications into Web pages.
