in reply to XML as part of the Web app warchest....

Just ignore him. Listen to what you're saying here:

One of my new apps may benefit by being usable on WAP enabled devices.

Do you really want to make a drastic change in your development mehtodology because "one" of your apps "may" benefit? And didn't WAP basically fail? I don't hear much about it these days.

If you want to make an application that can output PDF, or HTML, or XML, or WAP, or whatever else comes along, just write it using templates. Separate the logic parts of the application from the presentation, so that you can always pass the data into a new template and generate something else.

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Re: Re: XML as part of the Web app warchest....
by jdtoronto (Prior) on Oct 07, 2003 at 01:10 UTC
    Very good point!

    So, what you are saying is, that by using an appropriate template I can output HTML, or XML or whatever. I am not sure how PDF would be generated with templates, but I am certain somebody will tell me! What you are sying perrin is that I can generate XML and do whatever with it, rather than having to use XML internally. Of course even a 'simple' templating package like HTML::Template should produce output in other markup styles dependant purely on the template itself.

    Well, yes, WAP or whatever. When I had anything to do with cell-phones and the like I was designing the hardware, you know RF stuff and the like, not the firmware :) I am going to have to do a bit of a refresher on those pesky things. It is not just "one app" as such. It is a suite of tools which will include a scheduler for sales-people. The customers actual words it would be useful for us if the sales people using the new internet capable phones, or devices such as the Blackberry from RIM could access their scheduler functions and the like.

    As a programmer - logic and presentation have no part being mixed up with each other. This afternoon I whipped up a simple test app with several functions - in PM terms - nodelets. By using a couple of different templates and a couple of stylesheets I effectively had a very neat 're-skinnable' application. This is the degree of separation I am looking for. Thus this will obviously effect my choice of template systems for this is the degree of flexibility the client is wanting to pay for!

    jdtoronto

[reply]
      PDFs are basically PostScript, and people have used Template Toolkit (and probably other things) to generate PostScript. Then you pass it through something like ps2pdf. I believe in some cases the relevant part pf PDF is plain text, so you can actually do it just like HTML.

      If you ever find something that you can't generate simply with a template, you just need to change your application a little to support views being implemented in different ways, i.e. this view uses HTML::Template and this one uses PDF::Reuse.

[reply]

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