Reinhard Poetz wrote:
Tony Collen wrote:
Do we need a new, (standardized?) or possibly even *gasp* better templating system for Cocoon? This is where I encourage people to dive in and give their own [RT]s and thoughts on the issue.
First, thank you for the pointer. Interesting stuff.
But first, we should agree on our needs and then we should choose a technology.
IMO less is more - the templating engine should really focus on presenting data. I see following needs:
- really powerful query language to access * all kind of objects * incl. passed DOM trees - control structures like for/each, if, choose - call methods on passed objects - stream objects (DOM, XMLizable, ...?) - and probably a way to define macros (see cForm macros)
- Ability to directly produce SAX events, for efficiency reasons.
Don't know whether we need the possibilty to use xPath expressions on passed objects. On one hand it would be helpful, on the other we probably end again with two different syntax.
XPath is a must-have when you deal with XML documents while Jexl is mostly useless in that case but is straightforward when you deal with JavaBeans. I also agree that understanding the difference between "${continuation.id}" and "#{$continuation/id}" is less than evident.
So what about a unified syntax for expansion tokens, within which different languages could be used. Example:
- ${continuation.id} // Jexl, default syntax
- ${xpath:$continuation/id} // xpath
- ${im:defaults:skin} // input-module
- ${ognl:$continuation.id} // OGNL [1]
Sylvain
[1] http://www.ognl.org/
-- Sylvain Wallez Anyware Technologies http://www.apache.org/~sylvain http://www.anyware-tech.com { XML, Java, Cocoon, OpenSource }*{ Training, Consulting, Projects }
