Are you serious?
I see the plethora of templating tools as being the single biggest problem with
Perl web application development right now.
Don't get me wrong, they're all insanely great and written by extremely smart
people. But the featuresets overlap enormously, they have incompatible
templating syntaxes, and incompatible APIs. It's not just that there's more
than one way to do it, there's *twenty* ways to do it, and using any one of
them requires you to nail yourself to it. You have to learn the system
paradigm and API, you have to learn the templating syntax, you have to train
your HTML coders in the syntax, and you have to accept that your applications
are going to be tied heavily to that module.
My experience differs greatly from yours in the success of interoperability
using multiple templating systems inside one server. Even just two versions of
a very similar templating module (mine) caused enormous confusion on the part
of the other Perl programmers and amongst the HTML coders. I can't imagine how
confused they'd get with systems as radically different as Mason and AxKit and
Embperl and TT and Apache::ASP and HTML::Tree and Text::Template and
Text::TagTemplate and CGI::FastTemplate and HTML::Template deployed in the same
installation. My head explodes at the thought.
I would love to work on standardization of at least the basic featureset in
templating, but I don't know who else would be interested in the effort.
It would really require all the major templating system developers to work with
it, and maybe that cat's too far out of the bag. I think that's a real shame
if it's true, that just as we are starting to get settled on a really basic
featureset for templating, we are diverging into all these different
development worlds reimplementing the same ideas in slightly different forms.
On Thu, Jul 27, 2000 at 03:31:19PM -0400, aaron wrote:
> --- begin sappy gratitude ---
>
> my ideal system is having an environment where there are many tools.
> i love seeing all the differences spelled out more! how fuckin' cool!
> having these choices make mod_perl the best choice i can imagine. thanks
> everybody!
>
> -- end sappy gratitude --
--
Jacob Davies
Lead UNIX Engineer
SF Interactive
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
