Alpaca - Easy Forms for jQuery

Alpaca is the Easy Forms Engine for jQuery

Web, Mobile + Tablet Forms for Bootstrap, jQuery Mobile and jQuery UI

Alpaca generates forms on-the-fly using JSON schema and JSON configuration to define object models, types, properties, validation logic and layout. Alpaca generates intuitive forms for your users while giving your business an assurance of data compliance.

The Alpaca library is pre-packaged with controls, wizards, layouts, I18N support and pluggable template engines (we ship with support for jQuery.tmpl(), EJS and Handlebars). API Documentation is provided so that you can extend Alpaca as you see fit.

The philosophy behind Alpaca is that you should design your forms once and have them work on lots of different devices and UI engines without recoding.

Here are some examples of Alpaca running with different UI front-ends:

Using Twitter Bootstrap Using jQuery Mobile Using jQuery UI With AMD and RequireJS

Alpaca is a community-led open-source project licensed under Apache 2.0.

Copy the following two lines into your web's <head/> block after jQuery:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.alpacajs.org/js/alpaca.min.js"></script>
<link type="text/css" href="http://www.alpacajs.org/css/alpaca.min.css" rel="stylesheet"/>

Add a <div> tag to your HTML page and call $.alpaca() with your form data:

<div id="form1"></div>

<script type="text/javascript">
$(function() {
  $("#form1").alpaca({
    "schema": {
      "title":"User Feedback",
      "description":"What do you think about Alpaca?",
      "type":"object",
      "properties": {
        "name": {
          "type":"string",
          "title":"Name"
        },
        "ranking": {
          "type":"string",
          "title":"Ranking",
          "enum":['excellent','not too shabby','alpaca built my hotrod']
        }
      }
    }
  });
});
</script>

Enjoy your newly rendered Alpaca form.

Alpaca is a JavaScript library that uses jQuery and runs in most modern web browsers. With every release of Alpaca, we run a library of unit tests across a matrix of operating systems, browsers and versions. As the project grows, we are expanding this matrix to include more combinations and testing.

This table shows our tested stack. If not shown, it means that Alpaca hasn't been tested on that platform and browser combination. That said, please feel free to evaluate on your own. There is a good chance Alpaca will run just fine.

Browser	Windows	Mac OSX	iOS	Android
Chrome			-
Firefox			-	-
Safari				-
Opera			-	-
IE	(IE 9 and beyond)	-	-	-

It's easy to get started. You can grab the code and drop it into your new or existing projects. You can also download the source code, build it yourself and customize Alpaca for your own projects.

Downloads

We offer official releases for Alpaca for use in production environments as well as development snapshot builds for use in test.

Source Code

Join the Alpaca Project on GitHub to access the source and contribute to the growing Alpaca Community! Alpaca is licensed under the Apache 2.0 open source license.

Tutorials, Form Demos and Mobile Examples

Check out our tutorials and documentation to get a sense of what Alpaca can do for you. Also take a look at some Complex Forms and Framework Demonstrations. These cover implementing Alpaca with Twitter Bootstrap, jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile.

We've also provided a few additional mobile-specific examples for iPad and iPhone.

Developer APIs

We provide an API and Component Reference that describes all of the nifty components and controls that are available out-of-the-box. This will give you an idea of how to build your own extensions.

All of our Unit Tests are online.
We also provide Alpaca API JSDoc.

Alpaca Integrations

With its performance and extensibility, Alpaca has been adopted by various users as their forms service for creating and editing structured JSON.

Alpaca can also be easily integrated with other Content Management Systems.

Community Forums

If you have a question about Alpaca, please visit the Alpaca Forums. We'd love to get to know you and to hear your feedback!

jQuery Forms Made Easy

What is Alpaca?

Alpaca is the Easy Forms Engine for jQuery

How do I use Alpaca?

Videos