Open Source Network Blog

Jisse Reitsma

Jisse Reitsma is co-founder of Jira ICT, wrote a book on Joomla! Templates, teaches many courses and programs in Joomla!, Magento and Drupal. Authors profile

The Joomla! core team must somehow gained access to my computer. Already for sometime I was working on an extra PHP-library for Joomla! extensions that allowed me to build HTML forms quick and fast. As I am nearing completion on this work, I was amazed to see that the Joomla! core team had almost finished work on a new Joomla! forms API within the Joomla! framework.

So I checked the most recent Joomla! 1.6 version from Subversion and had a look at the new JForm API that resides in /libraries/joomla/form/. You can't imagine my face when I started browsing through the code: It looked exactly the same as my work!

The new Joomla! API

The new JForm API includes methods to add new fieldsets and fields to a form-object. It also includes filters and validations. But instead of working from one huge class, it uses seperate subclasses that extend JFormField. Defining the form can be done through PHP-code, but also through XML, which makes it a lot easier for many people to maintain forms. The fields that can be added include ofcourse regular input-boxes, but also editor-fields, radios, various dropdowns with for instance usergroups and accesslevels and the famous combo-box (which is an inputbox and a selectbox in one).

My Jira API

My API does exactly - no serious, I'm not joking: EXACTLY - the same thing. My JiraForm API includes methods to add new fields and fieldsets to a form-object. It uses subclasses extending JiraFormField. Validations and filters - they are all included. Many of the field-types defined in JForm were also present in JiraForm, except for the ones I did not need. One thing my API did not have (yet) was the XML-thing - but I already had a whole architecture layed out and waiting for some free time.

Conclusion

I can only guess that the Joomla! core team somehow took over my computer and based their ideas on my work. Nah, joking. It's just amazing how technical people can think the exact same thing.

Without hard feelings I will drop my work and embrace the new JForm API. Besides a good laugh on this coincidence I had good fun writing my API anyway.