Panagiotis Skias

This talk covers my first implementation (within the company) in an Angular Project – specifically, the creation of dynamic forms. I begin by highlighting the importance of forms in modern applications, and how different stakeholders – such as designers, business teams and developers – each bring their own perspective and requirements to the table.

From there, I introduce the business problem, outlining the specific requirements and constraints involved. I walk through my initial thought process: how I planned to approach the problem, what I aimed to achieve, and – just as importantly – what I wanted to avoid.

The core of the talk revolves around a key dilemma I faced: should I stick with Angular’s built-in form-building tools, or build something more abstract, flexible, and innovative? This dilemma represented a broader tension between concretion and abstraction. I wanted to strike a balance – to gain the benefits of both approaches while minimizing their downsides.

My first implementation attempted to walk that line, but as I looked further ahead, the limitations became clear. That led me to rethink my approach entirely. The turning point came with discovering Formly, an open-source Angular library for building dynamic, JSON-powered forms. I’ll explain how I adopted Formly, how I integrated it into the project, and how it helped resolve the core challenges.

The talk concludes with a broader reflection on the potential of using JSON not just for dynamic forms, but as a powerful abstraction tool across other parts of an application.