David Cantrell sent the following bits through the ether:
> I do use a home-brew embperl-a-like cos it does the job.
OK, I don't think this point has been made before, or if not it's
worth repeating. [this is more for home-brew systems in a company
situation, not on your own]
Home-brew systems are a really silly idea. Nobody but the writer
understands it, and he'll leave soon. It's generally very tied to your
current dataset and won't expand to cope with The Next Project. They
tend to have crap documentation. They tend to involve more work
updating the templates than it actually would be to update the
generated files.
Projects on CPAN/the web have generally been in development for a long
time. The developer is open to ideas. There is often a mailing list
with many developers who understand the system and provide
information, guidance, and patches. There are many users. The
documentation is good. The project is freely available (it's on CPAN
for goodness sake) and not tied to your company. You can usually often
adapt the project to your needs. You can hire people with skills in
that project.
It's a bit like that Microsoft / open source thing.
Case study: When I was working for Blueberry in Fulham, they had there
own home-grown markup language which was glorified SSI. The creator of
this language had left the company. There was no documentation. My
task once a week was to update a horoscope page. This took me two
hours, for no apparent reason. I had to do it through their templating
system for (insert IP here). It was stupid and dumb.
I'm willing to be convinced. As Mark says,
[10:10] <@Trelane> As I said, you want to plug a tempate system, give us a talk
[10:10] <@Trelane> I think that's the only fair way to do it
We've had good Template Toolkit and AxKit talks. We like both
solutions. If you think that's entirely because we've had the talks
then prove us wrong and talk for five minutes about your favourite
templating system.
Leon, who is thinking of leaving London.pm
--
Leon Brocard.............................http://www.astray.com/
Iterative Software...........http://www.iterative-software.com/
... What if there were no hypothetical questions?
