Re: choosing the best templating system

I've done a fair amount of work with Petal recently on the MKDoc project. In general it's a pretty neat system, but it does suffer from some signficant drawbacks:

Terrible error messages. If something goes wrong you're pretty much left on your own to figure out what it was.
XML was never meant to be edited by hand, a fact that will become painfully obvious if you try to edit your templates in a normal text editor!
It's quite slow. I've seen cases where relatively simple templates take several seconds to process for no obvious reason.

-sam

PS: Of course, no discusssion of templating would be complete without a pointer to the article on the subject, Choosing a Templating System by our own perrin! Ignore it at your own risk.

Comment on Re: choosing the best templating system

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Re^2: choosing the best templating system by jbrugger (Parson) on Jul 06, 2005 at 17:20 UTC
Would you mind telling me a bit more about the drawbacks? On what machine were you running, how was the memory usage of the module? what version were you running, were you able to fine-tune or cache the templates? Would you suggest another systen then Petal, since it's not mentioned in the other nodes that go about this subject, and the fact that it's supporting international (i18n) makes it interesting for me, and i'm quite charmed by the way the tal-tags are implemented in the xhtml-tags. Till now i allways was using HTML::Template and HTML::Template::Expr. The newer HTML::Template::Pro i wanted to trt did not compile on my machine however. "We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise." - Larry Wall.	[reply]
Re^3: choosing the best templating system by samtregar (Abbot) on Jul 06, 2005 at 17:58 UTC
On what machine were you running, Fedora Core 3 running under VMWare on Windows XP SP2. The machine is an AthlonXP 2500 with 756MB of RAM. how was the memory usage of the module? It's hard to say. MKDoc is generally a memory-hungry system so it's not easy to say how much Petal contributes to that. were you able to fine-tune or cache the templates? I didn't spend the time. In this case a few seconds was acceptable. The newer HTML::Template::Pro i wanted to trt did not compile on my machine however. Gee, that's too bad. And I thought it was supposed to be the professional version! ;) -sam	[reply]