Your templating engine sucks and everything you've ever written is spaghetti

Re:Your templating engine sucks and everything you've ever w... by dools on Sunday December 11, 2011 @02:17AM (#3339533)

Sorry einhverfr I can't reply to your comment - but what I think you're talking about is trying to abstract display for HTML, PDF, LaTeX, whatever into a common markup language or template, then repurpose that markup for each output format. Does that sound correct?

So like, you'd want to be able to have something like:

  <article>
        <title><% print article.title %></title>
  </article>

then do something like:

  $tpl->article = fetchSomeArticleFromTheDb()
  $tpl->output('template_name',Format::PDF)

My argument to that would be that there's no realy need for that abstraction - you don't gain anything by it because you have to have some abstracted output engine that is capable of doing that HTML can already do, which is like, HTML :)

Hey, I'd love to continue the discussion, but I think the HN comments are kind of limited in how much they want you to discuss here, feel free to email me [email protected]

EDIT: oops, code formatting

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Re:Your templating engine sucks and everything you've ever w... by einhverfr on Sunday December 11, 2011 @05:13AM (#3339773)

Just to be clear, I am not entirely hostile to the idea here. I just think that there are plenty of cases where generating high quality printed content or the like doesn't work with it and templating is a lot cleaner in those environments. And when your application already requires templating for a reason like that, adding an entirely different way of handling another output format adds needless complexity.

One of the useful applications of dools' ideas is that you could have a mockup which included lorem ipsums or other dummy text. This would make it easier for web developers to test layout.

OTOH, as I say, I am not at all convinced that it is a net win for programs that generate multiple formats of output./

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Re:Your templating engine sucks and everything you've ever w... by einhverfr on Sunday December 11, 2011 @02:37AM (#3339555)

Not really. I will email you though :-)

I will probably post something on the selection and design of our templating system for LedgerSMB in my blog too (http://ledgersmbdev.blogspot.com) by the end of the week.

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