[Typo3-dev] RFC Forms, validation, etc. in 5.0

[Michael Scharkow]

Hi *,

as Sebastian Kurfürst just proposed a refurbished evaluation API for 
TYPO3, I'm jumping in here and propose some bigger changes for T3 5.0:

Problem: TCEMAIN is HUGE and difficult to maintain, as is TCEFORMS. 
Forms in the BE are manually created everywhere, validation both in 
Browser (via JS) and in TCEMAIN (when CRUD ing table rows) is difficult.

Solution: Large refactoring and more MVC and DRY (yes, I did a lot of 
Rails recently).

1. Create class.t3_forms to create a simple but flexible API for 
creating *all* kinds of forms, input fields and stuff. Basically 
implement PEAR:HTML_Quickform which we can't use for license issues and 
because it's not flexible enough IMHO. This will be a rather low-level 
API to be used both in BE and FE.

2. Create a class that renders our data models (=$TCA, because that is 
exactly what $TCA defines) into forms, complete with validation and all. 
We can draw on TCEFORMS for that (and there's also a dozen FE extensions 
which do this) but use t3_forms classes for actual rendering in order to 
remove *all* HTML form that code.

3. Validation of data is done with a dedicated t3_validate library that 
can be accessed directly through a PHP API *and* via AJAX. This enables 
us to get rid of most JS currently used for evaluation and have nice, 
slim forms as seen in 
http://particletree.com/features/degradable-ajax-form-validation/

4. Finally, use TCEMAIN only for actual data manipulation, like new, 
copy, move, etc. If we have a clean API for that, we can juggle with 
data from outside the BE.


I am currently working on (1) because the other tasks depend on that. 
But since I know a lot of development is going on in hiding in TYPO3, 
I'd like to ask if people here are working on this already, or are 
interested in making this happen, or think these ideas are complete 
bull... I'd rather know this before starting such a project ;)

Greetings,
Michael

PS: Kasper, those backend forms and wizards are *really* hardcore code, 
respect! :)