Re: templating, anyone?

On Fri, 3 Sep 2004 11:30:42 -0700, Sebastian <buddhahead@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi! This is my first time writing, so go easy on me :p > > I've had a couple of conversations with the folks at pear-group and > about another templating engine and received their thoughts, but yours > matter, too. I'm going to provide some of the conversation (my > reasoning behind wanting another templating engine) and see what you > guys think. If someone is currently working on a templating engine and > would want to implement the things I speak of, I would be glad to help > with that project. Otherwise, please consider the following :) > > ------------------------------------------------------- > > (Pasted from another e-mail to pear-group) > > Before you object, I want to let you know that yes, I already know > there are tons of templating engines written in PHP, even ones that > may implement PHP's native parsing ability. If there are already > engines that implement what I have implemented, please point me to > them because I have not found any. I wouldn't be requesting if I were > able to find something that implemented what I wanted :) Let me start > by stating what is wrong with many templating engines: > > - They are templates on top of templates. Special languages are > constructed and parsed to do what PHP already does natively. These > types of engines are inherently slow and inconvenient because you must > learn X parsing language (and regardless of simplicity, time is > money!) > - Footprints are too large -- there is usually too much code to be run > which adds to the longer load times and poor performance on lower-end > machines > - While some of the engines I looked at used a method I propose, they > used output buffering! And to what benefit? None, that I can see. > While some of the engines provided a filtering function, albeit > useful, is slow in any implementation that I can think of (more > parsing, more memory, less performance.... > - Some of the engines whose source I read were very basic but had many > of the aforementioned issues, making them undesirable. > > I made a number of references to engines whose source I browsed: > http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=123769 > -- I > read source for 16 of the engines listed in the first post on that > page -- they all (included a couple of other engines I found on the > 'net) had the issues mentioned above. > > Now, let me talk about what I propose: > > - Template parsing is done natively by PHP -- no tricky dance moves, > parsing overhead, or learning curve > - No output buffering, output is echo()'ed (or include()'d, as the > case may be) when requested -- this prevents overhead > - Nested objects (fun), named objects (eases dynamics of creation and > breaks from linear logic) > - Locking (quietly prevents others from adding templates when you have > finished your page) > - Approximately 200 lines of code (most of which is wasted on > formatting for readability) > - Fundamentals -- the engine I propose is very basic, but this doesn't > mean "un-featured." Considering the way it was written and what it > does, it provides opportunity for subclassing and scalability -- > adding filtering or caching (for example) is only a few steps away > (although I realize taking those steps may leads to the aforementioned > problems) > > For most large-scaled projects I have worked with, I have never used a > templating application such as Smarty -- usually they were simply too > heavy or too complex. Providing such basic > functionality would allow one to easily add or change functionality > -- > Doesn't Savant already do this? I thought that was the point of Savant.... If it does output buffering, I believe that with Savant 2 (or the minimal template that was discussed at length some time ago on pear-dev) that you can turn this off. It would be real easy to turn off output buffering via a simple added option if that's what you wanted. Check back in the archives for the templating threads about Savant as a PEAR package. If no one has actually written the whole code for the "simple" template engine, then I can see your code becoming the new "base template system" that the others can extend, as expressed in the threads I referred to above. -- DB_DataObject_FormBuilder - The database at your fingertips http://pear.php.net/package/DB_DataObject_FormBuilder paperCrane --Justin Patrin--