Re: More thoughts about PHP: Taglibs

Dr. Evil wrote:

It seems to me that one of the problems with PHP is that you have to include code in your HTML pages. Even with the cleanest design, you end up with HTML that looks like this: <html> Hello, <?php showusername(); ?>. Your last login was <?php showlastlogin(); ?>.<p> </html> No, you don't.

Have a script file that processes your information, then include() a template file that would have drop in replacements file1.php <? $name = showusername(); $login = showlastlogin(); include("template.html"); ?> template.html <html> Hello <?=$name;?> your last login was <?=$login;?>. </html> Your PHP file can get fancy. file1.php <? $template="foo.html"; $name = showusername(); $login = showlastlogin(); if ($login>60 days) { $template="foolate.html"; } include($template); ?> You can check conditionals, handle errors, etc., in your PHP file, without putting any function calls in your HTML template. We try to avoid putting function calls in the templates at all costs. variables - yes. logic (if/else/etc) - yes (on occasion). function calls? No.

This is ok, but it seems to me that java taglibs provide a more elegant way to do the same things: <html> Hello, <showusername/>. Your last login was <showlastlogin/>.<p> </html>

Again - what if showlastlogin returned an error for some reason? How would you handle that there? If the 'elegance' is simply saving a few keystrokes, that's not really doing much. :(

This lets the backend stuff be completely separated from the html design part of things. What do people think of this? I'm just now learning JSP so I'm thinking about the differences between PHP and JSP. It's not separated enough if you're possibly pulling back stuff from functions

which you haven't error checked. You would do that error checking in the template then, which doesn't strike me as very efficient in most cases.

In general, both are powerful ways of creating dynamic websites, but they have different characteristics and are better for different things. I'm learning java but I will continue to use both, depending on the task.