Justin French said:
> PHP itself is a great templating language :)
I've been studying on this myself. For some reason I didn't see this (is
it not explained well enough in books/websites/articles? Dunno.)
I used to code like so (shorthand), mixing business logic with
presentation: <html>
<body>
<?php
$result = mysql_query ("SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = '".$_GET["id"]."');
$row_array = mysql_fetch_array ($result);
?>
Name: <?=$row_array["name"];?><br>
Address: <?=$row_array["address"];?><br>
State: <?=$row_array["state"];?><br>
...
This was big trouble with my Front Page developer. She's a real estate
agent. She needs something visual and can't spend time learning something
else. Front Page's PHP plugin was buggy at best. Enter Smarty.
With Smarty, I was effectively separating business and presentation logic:
$page = new Smarty();
$result = mysql_query ("SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = '".$_GET["id"]."');
$row_array = mysql_fetch_array ($result);
$page->assign("name", $row_array["name"]);
$page->assign("address", $row_array["address"]);
$page->assign("state", $row_array["state"]);
$page->display("template.tpl");
---
<html>
<body>
Name: {$name}<br>
Address: {$address}<br>
State: {$state}<br>
...
But one of the original intentions of PHP was as a templating system. It
just takes a little planning and thinking to use it as such:
$result = mysql_query ("SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = '".$_GET["id"]."');
$row_array = mysql_fetch_array ($result);
$name = $row_array["name"];
$address = $row_array["address"];
$state = $row_array["state"];
$include("template.tpl");
---
<html>
<body>
Name: <?=$name;?><br>
Address: <?=$address;?><br>
State: <?=$state;?><br>
...
A kool side effect is I don't have to learn another language. And it's
faster because less code loads on each page launch (Smarty's code must be
loaded on every page load). At worst, I lose caching features (however
other native PHP options exist, and/or use Zend) and some of the nice
Smarty functions such as html_options (which might be easily replaced by
phpHTMLlib or another widget library).
So while Smarty isn't at all bad, it doesn't appear to be *necessary* to
separate business logic from presentation. And I don't need to learn
another programming language.
So I may be going back to straight PHP :-)
For more info, read this:
http://www.phppatterns.com/index.php/article/articleview/4/1/1/
This article is rather rigid, stating that template engines are all bad.
I just see them as another tool, but not the *must have* I thought they
were before.
Thanks to Jochem Maas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> for helping me open my eyes.
/dev/idal
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