Using PDF Forms to Insert Data

Adobe is pretty heavily into document management. PDF Forms have been around for quite a while. They're XML based now.
Programming them is not trivial - lol.

Nothing direct. It's a server side thing and I did an install on some servers of the non-xml version. The forms code was an extension to the pdf language with a gui over it. Needed some tweaking.

Pricing at the time was a few grand up front and then yearly licensing. You can probably get current pricing at the adobe site but they may have it bundled with something else now. You may have to get some sort of core doc management product and then get forms as an add-on.

I've done mortgage apps before in java/jsp and in asp for both banks and for mortgage broker companies. You really... really... need to have pop-up help available next to each question. I don't know how well the current PDF Forms handles that. The old version wasn't good at it at all. There's also a lot of cheap "helper-mini-apps" available (e.g. what's my expected credit score, monthy payment, etc.) that you'd want to be able to pop-up from the application.

The other thing to look at is session contiuation. People don't fill out a mortgage app in one session. I kept forms info in a session object and serailized it at the end of each page. People could go back to adjust data in other pages or come back tomorrow and pick up where they left off from. Either way, the forms needed to have the capability of being pre-filled from either the sesion object or from the db.

Just as a note... Banks preferred/required running on Unix. Mortgage Brokers didn't care.