Many businesses rely on their website to engage their audience and collect information for various purposes. From surveys, to quote requests, to lead capture or more sophisticated forms such as home loan applications, the need to provide customers with simple intuitive forms that can capture data in an effective manner and channel it to downstream systems is essential.

Until recent years responsibilities associated with the administration of web forms were primarily in the domain of web developers who were responsible for building the interfaces, data validators, and the processing logic that could e-mail or feed the data to other applications. Producing, deploying, and maintaining the forms was a somewhat cumbersome and potentially costly endeavor requiring the collaboration of multiple technical and non-technical individuals.

To help with this problem, a number of vendors have begun introducing tools and services that almost completely eliminate the technical gap required to build these forms, and empower non-technical staff to easily configure and maintain complex forms, and data capture workflows. These tools make forms development a breeze by exposing easy to use interfaces in which users can drag and drop different input components such as text fields, drop downs, and date calendars (among others) into single column or multi-column forms that have one or many steps.

This new generation of services is a boon for companies both small and large, as they significantly reduce the costs of forms development and management and provide them with tremendous agility in developing, deploying and maintaining forms and data capture wizards.

Some of these services, such as FormStack and Wufoo provide the entire platform as a subscription service, requiring customers to build and host the forms in their servers, and generate shortlinks/embed code in order to deploy them. Other vendors provide stand-alone solutions such as Appnitro's MachForm, FormTools, and JSN Uniform which require customers to purchase a one-time low cost license that allows them to download and deploy/integrate the entire solution on their own servers or as part of their applications. As an added benefit, these licensed solutions are fully open source platforms that can be tweaked as needed to enhance or extend their functionality.

Although assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the numerous forms management platforms currently available can take some time, businesses who make use of web forms and data capture workflows would be well advised to make an evaluation, and move forward with the adoption of one of these services as their benefits far outweigh the (comparatively) minor up-front investment required to transition over.

For the greater part of the past decade, PHP's frameworks have received unfair criticism regarding their ability to manage high-volume traffic and resource-intensive transactions. Part of this was due to PHP's lack of native multi-threading support, and the other had to do with the extensive performance configurations necessary for existing MVC frameworks to perform adequately, since they often came bundled with resource-intensive libraries that had to be manually optimized or disabled.

In 2012, a new framework came to the scene called Phalcon. Phalcon has all of the traditional functionality and features that you might expect from a PHP framework, including ORMs, templating engines, caching mechanisms, authentication libraries, and a plethora of features, managing to deliver a wide array of functionality without sacrificing performance.

What makes Phalcon different, is that rather than relying on run-time loading of libraries and/or caching mechanisms to help speed things along, all of it's core components and libraries have been written in C, and compiled to run as a standard PHP extension. This approach leads to a jaw-dropping performance boost for applications built on top of Phalcon and catapults PHP into the stratosphere of heavy-lift web technology.

Although Phalcon's adoption rate is steadily increasing, there are those who have reservations about switching over due it's unorthodox deployment mechanism. For a community which is used to easily troubleshooting and building upon open source frameworks where the code is easily accessible, the fact that Phalcon is written in C rather than PHP, and cannot be modified without knowledge of the language, means that extending and troubleshooting issues will present some challenges for the uninitiated.

The good news is that the Phalcon community is making a great effort to improve, extend, and provide continuous support for the framework, and if things continue down this road, it's likely that even in a worst case scenario, Phalcon will carve a niche out for itself and find a place among organizations that have the expertise to manage it, and require systems that can handle large traffic and heavy processing, without sacrificing response times.