FormMaker uses a data driven design approach to construct pages. You can drag and drop data elements from W3C schemas, WSDL files, and databases to create the page design including any constraints that should be applied to the data. You can also use the range of design palettes containing standard and composite controls as well as page templates and reuse existing page content to design you web pages.
FormMaker allows data binding of posted information from the browser to business data, and for pre-population of page fields with existing data values before delivery to the browser.
Using FormMaker ensures the separation of business data from display formatting through the use of three components, a skin, CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) files, and the page contents. The skin defines the structure of each page to help ensure consistency across an application. The CSS file is used to control the visual display of each page, including fonts, colours, images, structuring, positioning, visibility etc. The page content pulls in both of these components to produce the final page.
FormMaker makes it easy to construct full web applications, not just the screens themselves, by linking pages to server side processing, which may include calls to remote services and databases, to achieve the required application flow.
For a high-level overview of MVC and FormMaker please refer to the MVC Overview document.