And by giving a nice mini-language, presentation logic can be encoded in the template, while data logic is traditionally coded in the Perl side, and carefully controlled. Yes, people blur it in both directions, but that's a style issue, not inherent in the design.

And to the comment that HTML::Template is cached under mod_perl, well, so is Template. {grin}

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

But regardless of the templater that you use, spliting perl code from HTML is one of the most benifical thing you can do with for your CGI.

One of the addition benefits of Template (beyond what merlyn said),

There is nothing that merlyn listed in his post that shows an advantage of Template over HTML::Template. He did place it on equal ground but did not state any features it held that HTML::Template did not.

is that Template is language neutral, and as WAP-enabled sites become more common, using Template over HTML::Template may become beneficial, since all you need to do for delieving WAP vs HTML is change the template file; you should not have to touch any perl code save to point the Template processor to the right place. And then adding text-only becomes simplier as well.

Your point about easily changing the display method from HTML to something else is well-taken as an advantage of Template It was a key point in davorg's article which I found on his website and which seems to have vaporized from perl.com However, consider this part of your statement:

you should not have to touch any perl code save to point the Template processor to the right place.

But the obvious question is: you will have to change the display code, right? How would one change all the HTML tags to the formatting conventions of another format? Ie, plain text, XML, HTML, or WAP? One way would be to code in "Template HTML" so that you could transform all the tags at once, ie:

[% H1 %] This is a header
[% OL %]
[% LI %] we can make an HTML file if we want,
[% LI %] but we could make some thing else
[% LI %] just as easy.
[% OL %]
[download]

This is just brainstorming. I don't have a full answer.

davorg's article which I found on his website and which seems to have vaporized from perl.com.

It is still on perl.com, it's just a little tricky to find. It's here.

Another advantage of TT2 that you seem to have missed, is that TT2 isn't tied to web applications. It can be just as easily used in any kind of data processing system. I know people, for example, who use it to generate DNS zone files. How easy is that with HTML::Template?

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me

Well, that's the important part with regards to having one perl script put out output for numerous output formats. If the "output generation" is sufficient separated from the perl code, the perl code and logic is much clean, and all that is left to do is to write, for each output type you want to support, a template to fill in the blanks. If you set up the arguments that you pass to Template correctly, for example, you don't need to change the data that you pass to the Template processor, and in the various files, you write what you want to include. For example, if I was writing a on line bookstore, the HTML front end might have not only the ISBN, price, publisher, etc, but the short synapsis, reviews, etc etc. on every page. On the other hand, I might only want the ISBN, and short details for a WAP output. But I only need to write one database call to do both.

---

Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain

Now that is a nice fuckin article. Excuse my language. But you went balls out on that one. I'm surprised that with your background at eToys that you didn't mention BingoX::Chromium and XPP.

Your article would go well with the new book c_monster announced at use.perl.org entitled "Perl for the Web" which I think is also excellent.

Thanks. I actually did mention XPP, but it's really not as good a choice as the other modules I reviewed so I only covered it very briefly. BingoX::* was not something we used at eToys. It was used (and developed) by another company who we contracted to build a children's entertainment section of the site, which was totally independent and ran on separate hardware. eToys used a couple of homegrown templating systems, and later switched to Template Toolkit.

-mark

I propose to add link to this meditation from Module Review part of monastery - and I am wondering how many other excellent comparisions of other modules I missed.

So much more to learn...

pmas

To make errors is human. But to make million errors per second, you need a computer.