Authoring - Form editor

Because in our system forms are LISP objects, forms were orignally defined by writing LISP code. While developing a number of forms in the course of our research, we found that the process of writing these forms was very long and tedious, and subject to long hours of debugging. To remedy to this problem, we developed the Form editor, a general purpose tool for the authoring of forms and surveys.

Main Features

The Form editor provides a Graphical User Interface to the following facilities:

The Form Editor also offers a point-and-click interface to the Command Interface structures, which allows a user to take queries from a library of queries and add them to their form. Overall, we have found that the Form Editor cut by an order magnitude the time needed to author forms. Perharps the most strinking application of the Form Editor was the writing a series for forms to interface to itself: it was possible to write an interface to the Form Editor entirely in HTML.

The Form Editor is implemented entirely in ANSI Common Lisp, using the CLIM as the Interface Manager.