>>>>> "Nicholas" == Nicholas Thornton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Nicholas> I've looked at various templating modules on CPAN. The Nicholas> reason I'm writing my own is because the templating Nicholas> modules I've seen on CPAN are either too robust (undue Nicholas> increase in loading time), or don't have the features Nicholas> I want, or both. I'm also writing it to try my hand at Nicholas> coding things I haven't done before, or in ways I Nicholas> haven't done before. While that's an admirable goal, allow me to challenge that on a few points. If you cache the generated Perl code, Template-Toolkit is hard to beat. Will you be caching your parse of your templates? Also, there's a feature-creep in all templating systems. Initially, you don't need nested loops. But then, you do. So you strap it on. And then you want subroutines from others files, so you strap that on. Oh yeah, and arrays would be nice, as would nested hashes. More hacking. But it's worse than that. *You* may not need those features, but you upload *your* templating system to the CPAN, and then I download it and use it, and I find that *I* do. So, in the way that all internet apps eventually evolve to where they can read email, similarly all templating systems evolve to where they look a lot like Template Toolkit. Finally, I'm already familiar with TT, and there's a lot of literature on it (including a forthcoming book), and a very active support community. If you don't choose TT, you lose that leverage. (I could make the same argument for HTML::Mason as well.) Please, carefully consider what you're giving up by starting from scratch. -- Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/> Perl/Unix/security consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc. See PerlTraining.Stonehenge.com for onsite and open-enrollment Perl training!
