Arguably, one of the most tedious tasks that comes with building pages – or just parts of pages – is form validation. And by that, I mean handling all information that users provide in a given form and making sure that it’s in the proper format and safe to write to a data store.
For the most part, we don’t build forms that freely accept any type of information. We’re usually looking for names, dates, addresses, phone numbers, and so on. Sometimes, we’re looking for more, like payment information, in the case of building an eCommerce site.
At this point, there are validation libraries in the majority of common programming languages. This means it’s pretty easy to hook up a library to our work, pipe the information through it, and then report any errors before actually submitting any information.
But in the context of web applications, good validation is usually two-fold:
- Client-side form validation
- Server-side form validation
