in reply to Re: Why use templates?
in thread Why use templates?
Very good point. At a previous job I used perl to generate m4 (a `traditional Unix macro processor'), arguably a form of templating. The m4 was part of the Solaris package installation process for the product and was executed on the machine upon which the software was being installed (otherwise I probably would have just sent perl, this being in the days before perl shipped stock with Solaris :).
Recently I've taken to using Template Toolkit in place of m4 for generating config files based on dynamic data (network monitoring using Nagios for 70+ (and growing quickly) remote boxen and routers). There's nothing remotely HTML related about it, it's just much simpler for me to say `type this to add a new host':
[% host( name="foo", addr="10.1.1.99" ) %]
than it would be to make everyone learn how to (reliably, without typos) produce:
define host{ host_name foo alias foo address 10.1.1.99 check_command check-host-alive max_check_attempts 3 process_perf_data 0 retain_nonstatus_information 0 notifications_enabled 0 notification_interval 120 notification_period 24x7 notification_options d,u,r,n }
(Yes, I'm aware Nagios has a form of templating internally, but that can't be driven externally with perl logic. This way I can make the macros smarter (e.g. you may see a definition for host bar, but it won't be live yet so there's no point in monitoring it so don't output anything).)
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