I finally find myself writing a decent amount of XHTML and CSS again for the first time at work in at least 2-3 years for a web application I’m working on. Hard to believe I’m actually away from writing webservices, XML Gateways, frameworks, DAO’s, and other such things for a couple of days. I was not looking forward to the age old problem of having to enter in data each time I want to test a form, messing with auto-complete, etc., and I came across this plug-in for Firefox and Mozilla to help me avoid repeating those pains again.

How it works
The form data will be saved into the preferences to its context, which is calculated on the base URI, the form name and and a hash value over all form elements. So every page should have it’s unique key where the values are stored.

Features

• Load/Save form data
• Reset all forms
• Delete actual form data from the preferences
• Delete all form data from the preferences
• Helpfile included
• TripleDES password encryption

Possible configuration

• Load form data automatically when page loads
• Save form data automatically when page unloads
• Visualize all load/save actions directly in the form fields
• Do/don’t overwrite already filled form elements
• Do/don’t save empty values
• Do/don’t save passwords

It’s certainly about time someone addressed this problem. Open source software is good stuff.

I know this isn’t really a ColdFusion topic, but I’m sure a good percentage of those who read this will actually find it useful.