For some years I've been a fan of the HTML::Template templating
language. Now that I work in Java, I've spent some time implementing
a Java version. (I wasn't aware of Philip Tellis's version when I
started, and I needed slightly different caching features anyway.)
A colleague asked an interesting question about tmpl_includes. The
point was, how do I make an include reusable from multiple pages? I
answered that you could simply write a function that populated the
template variables that the include required. A user of the include
would be required to call the function, and that would constitute
reusability.
He objected that this could cause namespace collisions: you have to
carefully check that the includes you're using don't use a variable
name you'd like to use in the template. Otherwise, the filler
function will clobber some of your variables.
At first, I had no response to that. But later it occurred to me that
HTML::Template already had a namespace facility: loops. Imagine
having a one-element loop called NAMESPACE and a template snippet like
this one:
<tmpl_loop name=NAMESPACE>
<tmpl_include name="myfile.tmpl">
</tmpl_loop>
The include will proceed as usual, but the variables in the include
file will be effectively "protected" under its own namespace. This
has the added advantage that the include's companion function doesn't
even have to know anything about the template; it can simply return a
hashtable which the parent will apply to the include's namespace. For
example:
$t->param(NAMESPACE => &myfile_getparams());
This is all possible without changing HTML::Template. The part I
don't like is the dummy one-element loop. Instead, it would be nice
to be able to specify the namespace when doing the include. For
example:
<tmpl_include name="myfile.tmpl" namespace="foo">
Obviously, this can be *implemented* as a one-element loop called
"foo". But it doesn't have to be -- that is obviously up to the
individual implementors.
What do you think?
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