Form (programming)
In component-based programming, a form is a representation of a GUI window. A form contains components and controls typically including "OK" and "Cancel" buttons, these objects provide a high-level abstraction of standard or custom widgets which are typically much easier to manipulate than the GUI's underlying API.
At design time, visual controls and non-visual components are placed on the form. These controls and components are positioned and sized interactively, and their properties and event handlers are set with a special editor typically laid out as a grid.
At runtime, automatically generated code creates instances of these controls and components, and sets their properties.
Historically, forms were often implemented as screens on a block-oriented terminal connected to a mainframe computer. HTML forms are conceptually very similar.
