Is there a better way (via an appstore module or some other technique) to perform validation on web forms?
The out of the box validation is pretty rubbish (in my humble opinion); if I have a page with a series of controls that require validation, and a button to perform an address search (for example) then all the button will do is trigger all the validation messages. The customer has to know to answer all the validated questions correctly before they can do the address search.
Customers do not think like computer programmers!