QuickForm isn't

I find myself drawn to QuickForm because I like the idea. Create elements, define rules for them, add them to a form, and it does the rest for you. It should be that simple. But I find myself fighting with it. I feel like I should be able to develop faster, but I get the feeling that I would have been better off without "Quick"Form. What is the best form building software out there? Does anything exist? Am I just using the wrong language? Are all the good packages written in Python and Ruby? I really haven't been able to find anything. I understand that some of this is baggage due to PHP <= 4. QuickForm2 is vaporware at the moment, and I don't know if it solves any of these anyway. If QuickForm2 fixes these, count me in. Your thoughts on any of these questions would be very much appreciated. Why does QuickForm bother me so, you ask? Let me tell you where I've been frustrated. Many of these are small things, and many were bugging me a year ago, so sorry if I'm a bit fuzzy. - Perhaps the single largest problem with QuickForm is its bloat. Should the argument be an array? An object? A string? Trick question! It can be anything! I was working on a set of forms last fall, and they were running slow. 30 seconds to render a form is pitiful. So, I profiled it, and found that most of my time was spent in QuickForm & parent classes, trying to figure out what type my arguments were. I'm looking at the use of is_array(), is_string, is_object(), etc. Really, that's just disgusting. There should be one, simple, well defined, set of arguments. If it doesn't work, throw an error and crash. Programmers should just fix their own damn code. I ended up doing everything right, so it used the fewest cycles, and the script still takes forever to run. Too much bloat, plain and simple. And if the one function doesn't work for some reason, there shouldn't be 10 other methods that *might* do the job (or more likely they just screw things up internally if you touch them). At most there should be another, backup, powerful function that lets you really do something advanced. And I shouldn't need to understand the entire internal code path just to use it (been there, done that, wish I could have that day+ back). - Groups and Arrays. I should be able to create dynamic forms, where I don't know how many items there will be until runtime. QuickForm seems to rely on the idea that everyone always knows the exact ID of an element. This doesn't work for dynamically created elements. But hey, groups and arrays aren't valid XHTML anyway, because "[]" aren't valid ID chars. So in my version of QuickForm I've replaced them with a ":" separator. Just another ugly hack in already bloated code. And how about that Array renderer also? When extending it I got the distinct impression that I was pushing it to the limits. Especially if you're trying to nest things in a tree-like structure. I had to build a stack into the class to keep track of where I was in the form structure. It looks to be a holdover from before PHP supported objects. - Advanced Validation. QuickForm has the basics covered, like "Is there a value here?". Unfortunately, anything more complex is a pain. For example, what I spent a number of hours trying to get a good solution for this afternoon was if an option is selected in a given select list, then validate a set of fields. Otherwise, ignore the fields. What is the best way to $form->addRule() this?? It sounds simple, but I can't find anything that isn't another ugly hack. - Javascript Validation. It's a pain in the ass to write JS for QuickForm that isn't basic. A form with dynamically created groups is impossible to get the needed IDs to use with document.getElementById(), and really, I shouldn't need to anyway. Also, if I want to create a dynamically produced .js file and link to it from my header, I can't without rendering the JS, then removing the <script> tags that are hard coded into the function. - Access keys and labels. You'd think that a nice form class would make it easier to make accessible forms, but it's a pain. Trust me. But I've extended the renderer and done it anyway. Go me. - Select element. There should be automatic validation. Maybe there already is. I can't tell. I want some options disabled, I want optgroups, I want a line selected by default, but not valid (ie "Please select from the following options"). All of these should be implemented, and some of them are in my version of HTML_QuickForm_select but it's a real pain to have to extend the base class when trying to use something in the basic HTML spec. Well here I am, and I have more complaints, but I feel like this is a good place to start. I feel better after ranting on all this. Is there a good, well designed, form class out there? Is QuickForm2 heading in the direction to solve these problems? I would be willing to help work on QuickForm2 but I have a project that needs to show some progress quick. ~Seth