I agree with Dave, although I'm not sure that link points to Template Toolkit, looks like freestyle kite flying to me. Then again, I'm sure there is a relationship.
Here is a node about Template vs. HTML::Mason with several links.
I can't think of a reason not to use Template Toolkit, except that it's a whole 'nother protocol to learn. It embeds Perlish stuff inside a skeleton HTML file. I'd be more inclined to want to keep it the other way around. If you have lots of short bits you're gluing together and these bits are relatively stable, you might just build a %bits hash-- with each element being a key name and the value being the bit of text you want to inject. Then you can either assign that value using a CGI method, like print p( $bits{'this_key'} ); This keeps all the bits in a centrally maintainable place which is clear about what they do, and makes the code easier to streamline.
just my two cents, your mileage may vary. | [reply]
[d/l] |
Here's the problem I have with the templating systems. They're fine if you want to remove simple HTML from simple perl, but if you have a very complex HTML display (ie. things get printed several different ways depending on the data you have or don't have) or you have a lot of data, you end up with either a lot of data being stored in memory before it's sent off to the template or you end up with really complicated templates that are no easier to manage than their perl counterparts, and are even more confusing to the graphical designers who work on them.
Let's take, for example, a database pull that prints out entries grouped by day. Let's say we do this for a month, and there's a fairly good number of entries. If you're using DBI, all you have to do is just loop over your rows, printing out the data and, if you've come upon a new day, possibly a date header. However, with templates, you can't do this. You have to read all the data in, process it into its day and entry groups, and then pass it off to the template.
What would make life a whole lot easier is if I could move all my HTML strings out into one file where the strings are named or identified somehow, then print those named (and processed, if they contain variable subs) strings. Then I remove the HTML from my script without losing any of the very clean, efficient functionality of my processing.
Does anyone know of any modules that do that? It's not really a 'template', so to speak, but a connection of named lines. | [reply] |
Actually, your database example wouldn't be a problem
with the Template Toolkit. The TT comes with a number of
'plugins' that make interacting with various Perl features
much easier. One of these is the DBI plugin.
What you would do is pass into the template, either the
SQL to be executed or (more likely) some data to be used
in the where clause of your SQL. The DBI plugin
will connect to the database, execute the SQL and process
the rows one at a time. At no time do you need to have
all of the data in memory at once.
--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>
"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me
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Is that the same package that Ovid was talking about yesterday? If so, I think the URL is www.template-toolkit.org. www.tt2.org took me to a kite flying club!
But this package looks good and I'm going to give it a spin.
Update: In the last 5 minutes, I have watched the above link be transformed into "Freestyle: International FreeStyle Kite Flying"
Does anyone know what is going on?
Update 2: I think that Dave is finding out what happened to those sites. But in the meantime, you can access this stuff here. | [reply] |