On 23 Apr 2001, Michael Alan Dorman wrote:
> Errr, respectfully, I think you underestimate Mason's capabilities.
Not really. I've researched Mason quite a bit, and I talk with Jon every
ApacheCon/OSSCON about how we can bring together the Mason and AxKit
synergy. Now Jon has been to my talk, we both know about the advantages of
each solution.
> www.dorado.com/ is the website for the company I do most of my
> contracting with, built entirely in Mason, and it's almost totally
> static content, but we make extensive---almost exclusive---use of
> Mason's autohandler capabilities coupled with Mason's "object
> oriented" features to divorce individual pages from the overall
> presentation.
>
> As a result we were recently able to give the entire site a makeover
> in roughly three days from start to finish, because it's designed to
> largely separate content from templating. We had to change almost no
> individual page files, just the autohandler (read: template) that
> handles the site, plus tweaking the names of some rollover graphics.
>
> No more work than redoing the XPathScript and tweaking your taglibs,
> really.
It depends a *lot* on the type of content on your site. The above
www.dorado.com is brochureware, so it's not likely to need to be re-styled
for lighter browsers, or WebTV, or WAP, or... etc. So your content (I'm
guessing) is pure HTML, with Mason used as a fancy way to do SSI, with
Mason components for the title bars/menus, and so on. (feel free to
correct me if I'm wrong).
AxKit is just as capable of doing that sort of thing, but where it really
shines is to provide the same content in different ways, because you can
turn the XML based content into HTML, or WebTV HTML, or WML, or PDF, etc.
I talk about how the current Perl templating solutions (including Mason)
aren't suited to this kind of re-styling in my AxKit talk, which I'm
giving at the Perl conference, so go there and come see the talk :-)
So I take back that people wouldn't be using Mason for static content. I
was just trying to find a simple way to classify these tools, and to some
people (I'd say most people), Mason is more on the dynamic content side of
things, and AxKit is more on the static content side of things, but both
tools can be used for both types of content.
(I hate getting into these things - I wish I'd never brought up Mason or
EmbPerl)
--
<Matt/>
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