Dennis Daniels is a teacher who believes teachers should stop pushing papers and start using web forms instead. He produced couple of training screencasts for teachers showing how to use JotForm. In these movies he creates questionnaires for students and shows how to collect data.

When technology becomes easier, everybody starts using it. A good example to this is the blogs. It is now very easy to have a blog. If you can manage sending and receiving emails, you can probably manage a blog as well. With services like JotForm, anyone can now create forms and collect data over the web. You don’t need to know HTML. You don’t even need a web site. If you have blog or email, you can create surveys or feedback forms and just post a link.

Launching a new site is always fun and exciting. You put a lot of hard work on something and have that great feeling of accomplishment. At the same time there is that scary feeling that something might go terribly wrong. And it sometimes really does happen.

My worst war story was TheCounter launch on the post bubble days. The site had over 2 million free users and our company, mostly depending on advertising model, was bleeding for cash. We had to turn it into a paid site. However the code was impossible to change. Written on pre-PHP days, it was implemented as an Apache C module and had HTML code all over the web server code. If you wanted to make a word bold on a page, you had to recompile Apache and restart web servers on three machines.
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I am very excited to announce that the first web based WYSIWYG form builder JotForm BETA is now released. Try it yourself.

Completely Free!
JotForm is currently completely free. It will stay this way during BETA period. I must admit I have not decided on a business model yet. The most possible outcome will be a Pro version where users will get more benefits. At this point I am more interested in seeing the interest in this tool, collecting feedback from users and weeding out all the bugs.

Easy Try Out!
You can try it out without creating an account. Hey, if you only want a tool to create form source code for you, just create your form, get its source without even creating an account on the JotForm site. You will not even leave the homepage! It is probably one of the easiest ways to create forms.

But Can It Collect Data?
Although implementing the first real web WYSIWYG form editor was a very interesting task by itself, it is not that useful. All form building tools on the web provide data collection and access. So does JotForm. It is really easy to see results on the my forms section and you can even export them as Excel, CVS or some other delimited format. You can also receive notification emails.

Tools, tools, tools
JotForm is built on top of two super cool JavaScript libraries Prototype and Script.aculo.us. The server end is built using PHP and Mysql. Currently completely empty and lonely Forum runs on phpBB. Please if you are reading this go post a feature request or an angry bug report. The graphics are done on Photoshop and tour movies made with Camtasia Studio.