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>Keenforms started as an idea and a side project. It took more than 3 years of evenings and weekends to get something worth releasing. I've also worked on form

>Keenforms started as an idea and a side project. It took more than 3 years of evenings and weekends to get something worth releasing. I've also worked on forms with a rule engine for nearly 3 years almost full-time (started in 2017). It's a hard problem. There are some commercial no-code and low-code solutions. For forms with a rule engine you really want to have some debugger included that visualizes the data flow. Somehow people think one just has to author rules and then it's finished. And errors never happen. I take a lot of inspiration by the work of Chris Granger, Bret Victor, and the "Future of Coding" community. But also the UI/UX of Notion and ObservableHQ. Edit: Fix typos.

padseeker 6y ago
I'd be interested in connecting, hearing more about some of the challenges you've had. It is definitely a hard problem. I'm not familiar with any of the other no code or low code solutions available, can you share them?
- tauchunfall 6y ago
  >can you share them? There are at least two Switzerland-based and a US-based company, I'm aware of, working on rule-based forms (or questionnaires) in financial services. For instance Appway AG in Zurich (I'm not related to them). The challenges seem to be always sort of: - You have the business domain modelled in a relational (or document, or graph) database. You bind and synchronize the data between database and form. - You have a rule engine, which uses e.g. RETE-OO, which fires the rules when some object types and some of their object attributes defined in the rule input match changes objects in the form. The rule action changes other fields of the form. - You have a form editor where you can map form fields to entity attributes of the business model. Besides form components (text fields, selects, checkboxes, radio button groups) you can add headings and paragraphs. You can split forms into multiple pages and add (breadcrumb) navigation. You can add summary pages with an overview of the form data. - You have a vanilla UI design for the forms but can customize the forms completely. Starting from custom CSS to different CSS frameworks. Tailwind CSS and Headless UI (unstyled UI components) seem to go into the right direction (not only for fancy write-once web-agency marketing websites, but also enterprise web applications). You want to implement the form fields/components and consider labels, error states, disable and hide styles, and accessibility.

padseeker 6y ago

I'd be interested in connecting, hearing more about some of the challenges you've had. It is definitely a hard problem. I'm not familiar with any of the other no code or low code solutions available, can you share them?

tauchunfall 6y ago
>can you share them? There are at least two Switzerland-based and a US-based company, I'm aware of, working on rule-based forms (or questionnaires) in financial services. For instance Appway AG in Zurich (I'm not related to them). The challenges seem to be always sort of: - You have the business domain modelled in a relational (or document, or graph) database. You bind and synchronize the data between database and form. - You have a rule engine, which uses e.g. RETE-OO, which fires the rules when some object types and some of their object attributes defined in the rule input match changes objects in the form. The rule action changes other fields of the form. - You have a form editor where you can map form fields to entity attributes of the business model. Besides form components (text fields, selects, checkboxes, radio button groups) you can add headings and paragraphs. You can split forms into multiple pages and add (breadcrumb) navigation. You can add summary pages with an overview of the form data. - You have a vanilla UI design for the forms but can customize the forms completely. Starting from custom CSS to different CSS frameworks. Tailwind CSS and Headless UI (unstyled UI components) seem to go into the right direction (not only for fancy write-once web-agency marketing websites, but also enterprise web applications). You want to implement the form fields/components and consider labels, error states, disable and hide styles, and accessibility.