One of the things that I like the most with Salesforce.com is the ability to create custom forms for populating database tables. Problem is, at $125 per user and per month, I cannot use this tool with very many other people. I have been waiting for a more affordable solution for a long time, and this week saw the release of two candidates, jotForms and Wufoo. Even though they both remain quite primitive at this point, they will give you a taste of things to come.

I initially started with jotForms and built a simple survey aimed at readers of this blog. It took me five minutes to design the form and get it online. The overall user interface is a little bit confusing, and I could not figure out how to re-open a form, but other than that, the tool does the job it was intended to.

Wufoo is a lot more sophisticated that jotForms, sports a very nice user interface, and offers a comprehensive collection of form elements. It’s still under development, and does yet not offer named accounts. It also requires Flash Player 8 and does not work with Internet Explorer, even though the people at Infinity Box say they’re working on it. Beside those limitations, Wufoo is the most impressive online form builder I have seen so far.

Next step will be to provide integration between these tools and Office 2.0 databases such as Salesforce.com or QuickBase. Also, it would be interesting to see if jotForms or Wufoo could be turned into web-based development tools for XForms engines such as the Orbeon Presentation Server.

Many thanks to Emily Chang at eHub for pointing me to jotForm and Wufoo.