At 06:16 PM 7/7/2001 -0700, brian moseley wrote:
>On 7 Jul 2001, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
>
> > Yes. Writing a templating system in Perl is trivial.
> > Writing a *useful* templating system in Perl is
> > demonstratably hard.
>
>unless you keep application features in a separate layer
>from the templating system (eg the servlet api ;)
I think it is still quite difficult. Even if you have servlets, for
example, adding JSPs was quite a task. At issue is providing a minimal API
yet still allow the templates to do things that weren't originally intended.
In addition one of the criteria for "useful" to me is "fast". If the
template system is slow, it's quite annoying. However, this goes against
other people's ideas of "useful" being "full featured". As Steven Wright
says (paraphrased) if you had everything where would you put it?
So to make something that is powerful yet fast is quite the challenge. And
then there are architectural tradeoffs as to the type of application that
the template is being used for. Transactions? Portal based? Integrating
many apps together? Standalone?
Later,
Gunther
