Re: [Fwd: Re: [PEAR-DEV] MVC revisted]

Tony Bibbs wrote:

For example adding an optional template factory that supports any of the PEAR-based template libraries is on my to-do list.

Funny that you said that, because I started a thread last week about PEAR supporting/recommending standard interfaces for packages. I don't think having a factory is a good thing here because the engines are so different in their inner working and a factory would have to limit capabilities. My approach was to ask the package mainteners to comply with a PEAR-community approved interface. Since PHP5 helps code interfaces I think it's a good way to go. In a framework a template engine should be seen as a black box. We feed a template and data, and we ask for the result. We should care if the engine uses blocks, tags, pseudo-code or if the template is a string, a file or taken from a database. Here's a preview of what I'm writing (that's work in progress, I can't even guarantee that it would parse properly ;-) -Philippe <?php interface Interface_ContentGenerating {

    abstract public function openTemplate($template);
    abstract public function setData($name, $data = null);
    abstract public function setDataByRef($name, &$data);
    abstract public function output();
    abstract public function toFile($filename);
    abstract public function toString();

} class HTML_Template_???Interfaced extends HTML_Template_??? implements Interface_ContentGenerating {

    function HTML_Template_???Interfaced() {
        $this->__construct();
    }

    function __construct() {
        parent::__construct();
    }

    public function openTemplate($template) {
    }

    public function setData($name, $data = null) {
    }

    public function setDataByRef($name, &$data) {
    }

    public function output() {
    }

    public function toFile($filename) {
        $file = @fopen($filename, 'wb');
        if (!$file) {
            require_once('PEAR.php');
            return PEAR::raiseError('Couldn\'t open file to write template result to.');
        }

        $mgc = get_magic_quotes_runtime();
        set_magic_quotes_runtime(0);
        $length = @fwrite($file, $this->toString());
        set_magic_quotes_runtime($mgc);

        if ($length === false) {
            require_once('PEAR.php');
            return PEAR::raiseError('Couldn\'t write template result to file.');
        }

        if (!@fclose($file)) {
            require_once('PEAR.php');
            return PEAR::raiseError('Couldn\'t close file with template result.');
        }

        return $length;
    }

    public function toString() {
        ob_start();
        $this->output();
        return ob_get_clean();
    }

} ?>