“Continue later” for filling out Google Docs Forms

Google Docs/Spreadsheets forms can be used easily as a simple survey tool. You just have to send a link to the participants who have to fill out and submit the form. The only problem: The forms have to be filled out in one go, you can not come back later and continue editing the form. Of cause this is particularly bad when you a have a really long questionnaire.

On way to provide the “continue later” functionality is to use a tool that saves your web browser’s form state. Lazarus: Form Recovery is one of those tools for Firefox that constantly saves the state of your web forms and allows you to load previous content when you return to a website. This works very well with Google Docs Forms. You can interrupt filling out the form at any time, return later and restore the information you previously entered with a few clicks.

StarRating GWT widget

I recently experimented with Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and created a widget in the process. It’s a simple rating control as seen on many websites where users can submit a rating by clicking on a number of stars.
StarRating Example Application
The control currently features:

  • a custom number of stars in one row (horizontal)
  • a mouse hover effect
  • provides an RPC service interface to store and retrieve rating data
  • client side usage without a service is possible
  • ui customization via CSS is possible

Some features that are missing:

Nevertheless I believe this is pretty usable and maybe I’ll submit the widget to the GWT Widget Library Project if it is welcome. Anyway, feel free to use it but I won’t promise any further support – we’ll see. Here is the sourcecode of the StarRating widget.