Re: XSL vs. Smary

On Oct 18, 2004, at 2:01 AM, Christian Stocker wrote:

On 14.10.2004 16:15 Uhr, George Schlossnagle wrote:

On Oct 14, 2004, at 3:06 AM, Philipp Melab wrote:

I am building a small, extensible CMS-System for a bunch of simple websites (gallery, guestbook, articles... < 20MB) I have to create. To reuse the system i need some kind of template engine. At the moment I'm stuck between smarty and XSL. I already worked with XSL, so the complexity isnt a factor. Im thinking about implementing the system with JSP, Servlets too, which would make XSL the better choice too. What i need to know is the performance factor. Is far as i understood, XSL-Tranformations are running natively, but they have to be compiled everytime. Smarty-Templates are compiled and cached. So, which one is faster?

You should benchmark these on your templates. I'm using (the yet unreleased) fastxsl extension, whose comppiled stylesheet features will hopefully be added into php5's xsl extension (they have very compatible architectures). Using that, the transforms were much faster that I expected. On moderately complex templates, using real world data, I was seeing a total templatization time of around 0.01 seconds per page, and had no problems satisfying my performace requirement of 30 pages/second sustained.

I finally looked again at the fastxsl extension. The idea still looks promising and I think, we could integrate that somehow in the standard xsl extension (not decided about the API yet and thread issues..) Just one question: It doesn't look like XSLT files included with xsl:include|import are cached, or am I missing something?

They are. In fact, they're cached all too well - they're included in the memory allocation for the principal stylesheet. Options for that are being considered. George