While all of these systems are meant to be glorified form processors, they can be surprisingly useful if you're willing to adapt. Most interaction on corporate Web sites involves pure data entry, and that's all these tools do. Programmers might laugh that JotForm categorizes adding a star rating as a "Power Tool," but these form processors aren't playing to fancy programmers. They're looking for business folks tired of hoping programmers will answer their e-mail.

It's not really possible to do tricky customization of the interaction with these sites, but I don't know if much is necessary. You can't write a script that will examine the incoming data and look for special exceptions, but there's no reason why most of this can't be done off-line with some post-processing. The majority of the basic tools for stopping data format errors are built in.

Beyond the sheets

Whereas Wufoo, FormAssembly, and JotForm all began as sophisticated replacements for paper forms, other tools started as replacements for desktop spreadsheets. Although the tabular mechanisms began as tools for the accountants who want to play with the numbers, these tools are often used as a simple tabular database. Zoho, the online application company, even offers three distinct solutions that tackle managing rows and rows of data in slightly different ways. (See our review of Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet, along with other Office alternatives.)

Zoho DB is mainly an online spreadsheet that can be shared among users. Its direct cousin is Zoho Sheet, an online spreadsheet that's quite similar. While each user can input data, there's no form feature that would allow others to input their row directly, as in Wufoo and company. However, the reporting and manipulation tools are more sophisticated, offering the opportunity to pivot the data and rearrange it in useful ways.

If you want more sophisticated interaction with users, Zoho Creator is said to be an "application building environment" with a database hidden deep inside. The most notable feature is a scripting language that lets you construct special responses to the forms people fill out. This ability is lacking in the other form processing tools, and it can be quite helpful for dealing with the odd responses that people include. If your application can't let this wait for a human to post-process the data, then you turn to it. Zoho cautions users that Zoho Creator's database operations aren't as sophisticated as Zoho DB, and the company hopes to merge the two platforms eventually.

Programmers older than 12 who still pine for the days when code was written in ASCII and stored in files will be happy to know that some sites are still wedded to traditional ways. AppJet is a nice IDE for Web applications that lets you write the code in your browser. The entire type-test-debug cycle occurs on the client.