Rails forms...not so hot

Before running through the activities from the last two days, a word on rails forms. While this is not my first time using rails, I still fall into a state of confusion and bewilderment whenever using the forms on anything more complicated than the ideal one-object-to-one-form mapping. So far I am really displeased with form handling in the rails template language, it just doesn't seem to scale well to more complex objects.

That said, over the course of this project I've developed a pretty good approach for myself to keep my sanity. It basically amounts to two guidelines: keep it simple by not overusing helpers, think of everything as it will exist when passed into the params hash. In retrospect, these rules are fairly obvious, but they still work well as a mantra. I love the params hash, when used in conjunction the model helpers it is a very clean, JSON-like, solution. It feels intuitive to me. The rendered html, with its bracket notation (...input name="sibling[126067293][take]"...) is also very intuitive, you can "see" how it translates into the params hash. It's just the code that generates this html that sucks...hey, maybe I could just code straight html? Or make my own helpers? Need to think more about this. I wish I had more of an argument, but it's more of a feeling than anything else right now. More to come on this topic...

Yesterday and today:

• Solved JSON issue (from_json was not robust enough) with dave
• Played some foos!
  
• Process engine now passes first 8 of 20 workflow patterns
• Fixed process definition XML serialization bug
• Process engine now defaults all spawned tokens to wait-state on any fork, event code must "continue" the tokens, helper method created to facilitate this
  
• Controller integration
• Added wait_for_user_input helper method to process_engine
  
• Now supports custom view callbacks for controller interaction
  
• Default view handlers are in place for forks and end-of-process
  
• Created routing to handle process engine requests seamlessly and globally