There has been a fairly lively thread about Templating systems and Widgets on the mod_perl mailing list. I'd like to try to alert Perlmonks to its existance.

To summarize what has/is transpiring - a number of ideas about implementation strategies and a number of posts about objectives and requirements. Different opinions of what people want and how they think it should work! Furthermore one member, Stephen Adkins, is even firing up the Sourceforge!

The general gist is to create a widget strategy which will support multiple rendering options, multiple execution environments, and independance from templating systems.

Now - widgets also gives rise to thinking about things like GTK, TK, and so on! Suffice it to say there might be something bigger lurking in all of this. I'd like to see what others have to say to this end or any other previous mentioned or omitted!

p.s. - this is not about templating systems. This is about reusable software components which have visual features, properties and methods. They could potentially use a templating system to render their visual features.