[thelist] PHP Templating recommendations

Matt Warden mwarden at gmail.com
Wed Feb 2 15:51:56 CST 2005


John,

On Wed, 2 Feb 2005 15:52:46 -0500, John williams <thudfactor at gmail.com> wrote:
> Matt, your defense of Smarty and explanation of the tradeoffs between
> maintainability, readability, and code support is very well done --
> but misplaced. The original question was about what could be used for
> "smarty lite" for a small application program that did not need the
> power (or, indeed, the complexity).  For when Smarty would be "like a
> sledgehammer for a thumbtack," I think was the original phrasing.

Point taken. But, as I said in my last email, there are a lot of cases
out there where Smarty would be appropriate and beneficial, but
developers excuse ignoring it by saying that it is 'like a
sledgehammer for a thumbtack' or other such phrases, when what they
really mean is that they are afraid to learn a new syntax (which is
ridiculously trivial). I am not saying it applies here.

> Smarty is a non-trivial amount of code (~4000 lines) and requires some
> server infrastructure as well. If the program I'm writing *is*
> trivial, then tacking on Smarty (and PEAR::HTML_QuickForm) could
> easily double, triple, quadruple! the codebase and add server
> configuration requirements. 

I didn't have to change any server configuration. It's just a couple
included files. Your codebase argument is valid, though.

> And really, if all I'm doing with Smarty
> is {$var} or {if $var}{else}{if} then what gains do I get from Smarty?
> Most of the functionality of the class I don't need or want for such a
> miniscule project -- so why use it?

If that's all you're doing, why are you using PHP?


-- 
Matt Warden
Miami University
Oxford, OH, USA
http://mattwarden.com


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