html forms vs revlets

[Sarah Reichelt]

On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 6:20 PM, ron barber<runrevron at gmail.com> wrote:
> I left html when it was still v. 1 so I have had quite a bit of
> catching up to do as I have tried to integrate the new found power of
> revlets and my on-rev account. So bear with me as I try to sort things
> out as to the advantages of when to use what and how to communicate
> between them.
>
> So, typically you use <form> on the webpage to gather information from
> the user and then php or similar solution to process that information.
> Now we have revlets. Revlets (and <?rev tags ) can take the processing
> part and do wonders. But what about the <form> part? Is it stupid to
> think of using revlets in the place of forms to interact with the
> user? What are the pros/cons of putting up a stack with flds and btns
> vs putting up various flds and btns in a form?


I hadn't thought of using revlets in the place of forms but it is an
interesting thought.
Currently, we have html forms and the data they send can easily be
processed using irev scripts.
If you had a revlet acting as the form, there seem to be two ways it
could handle the submitted data. Either it could "POST" it all off to
a .irev file exactly or all the processing could be done in the revlet
itself, with any emails generated (using the mail shell command) and
data saved.

Obviously, for us Rev people, the idea of constructing a form in Rev
is much easier than constructing it as HTML, but it does limit your
form fillers to people prepared to install the plugin.

Anyway, it's definitely worth trying and I would love to hear how you
get on with it.

Cheers,
Sarah