Puneet,
Is this a recent development.
No. It's been like that for a few years if not since the beginning.
Can you point me to some documentation on this stuff.
I don't remember where I read this.
I need to retrieve the fields exactly in the order in which they were entered in the FORM.
You can use different field names to accomplish this. For example field1, field2, field3, ... Then in your java code you can loop through them until you run out.