I don’t know when it popped up, but as I’ve been working on a new Django project, I’ve been noticing the newforms documentation page. Today, I decided to check it out. I am quite impressed with what newforms do. The “old style” “automatic” form handling in Django revolved around database Model object and “manipulators” (which you could create from a Model). Form handling was closely tied to your database model. Indeed, form handling was closely tied to the Django ORM.
New style “automatic” form handling revolves around a Form object. Said Form object is apparently decoupled from the Django ORM. (I suspect this was a necessary step in order to integrate SQLAlchemy and any other non-Django ORM.) Here is an awesome little tutorial on using newforms.
Some of the benefits of using newforms are
- Less code in your view
- Less code in your template. I forgot to mention that newforms automatically generate HTML. Including errors! Very nice…
- Easily swap out form input “widgets”.
- Easily ties to an database model…or not.
If you can’t tell, I’m really worked up about newforms. Django just got a whole lot cooler. I’m sure I’ll write more on this later.
Technically, the old forms system wasn't coupled to the ORM -- it's just that the documentation gave the impression that the model-based forms were the best way to go. That was a failure in documentation more than anything else, but, still, newforms improves the old form API quite a bit. I'm really proud of what we've done with it so far, and it gets better just about every day.
Hopefully this improvement will actually include SQL Alchemy and the possibilities of schema evolution.
WOO HOO