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70 lines
3.9 KiB
Plaintext
70 lines
3.9 KiB
Plaintext
<preface id="preface">
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<title>Preface</title>
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<para>
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It is undoubtedly one of the most asked questions on the PHP mailing
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lists: how do I make my PHP scripts independent of the layout? While
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PHP is billed as "HTML embedded scripting language", after writing a
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couple of projects that mixed PHP and HTML freely one comes up with the
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idea that separation of form and content is a Good Thing [TM]. In
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addition, in many companies the roles of layout designer and programmer
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are separate. Consequently, the search for a templating solution
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ensues.
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</para>
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<para>
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In our company for example, the development of an application goes on
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as follows: After the requirements docs are done, the interface
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designer makes mockups of the interface and gives them to the
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programmer. The programmer implements business logic in PHP and uses
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interface mockups to create skeleton templates. The project is then
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handed off to the HTML designer/web page layout person who brings the
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templates up to their full glory. The project may go back and forth
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between programming/HTML a couple of times. Thus, it's important to
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have good template support because programmers don't want anything to
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do with HTML and don't want HTML designers mucking around with PHP
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code. Designers need support for config files, dynamic blocks and
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other interface issues, but they don't want to have to deal with
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intricacies of the PHP programming language.
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</para>
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<para>
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Looking at many templating solutions available for PHP today, most of
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them provide a rudimentary way of substituting variables into templates
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and do a limited form of dynamic block functionality. But our needs
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required a bit more than that. We didn't want programmers to be dealing
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with HTML layout at ALL, but this was almost inevitable. For instance,
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if a designer wanted background colors to alternate on dynamic blocks,
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this had to be worked out with the programmer in advance. We also
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needed designers to be able to use their own configuration files, and
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pull variables from them into the templates. The list goes on.
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</para>
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<para>
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We started out writing out a spec for a template engine back in late
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1999. After finishing the spec, we began to work on a template engine
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written in C that would hopefully be accepted for inclusion with PHP.
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Not only did we run into many complicated technical barriers, but there
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was also much heated debate about exactly what a template engine should
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and should not do. From this experience, we decided that the template
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engine should be written in PHP as a class, for anyone to use as they
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see fit. So we wrote an engine that did just that and
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<productname>SmartTemplate</productname> came into existence (note: this
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class was never submitted to the public). It was a class that did
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almost everything we wanted: regular variable substitution, supported
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including other templates, integration with config files, embedding PHP
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code, limited 'if' statement functionality and much more robust dynamic
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blocks which could be multiply nested. It did all this with regular
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expressions and the code turned out to be rather, shall we say,
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impenetrable. It was also noticably slow in large applications from all
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the parsing and regular expression work it had to do on each
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invocation. The biggest problem from a programmer's point of view was
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all the necessary work in the PHP script to setup and process templates
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and dynamic blocks. How do we make this easier?
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</para>
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<para>
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Then came the vision of what ultimately became Smarty. We know how fast
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PHP code is without the overhead of template parsing. We also know how
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meticulous and overbearing the PHP language may look to the average
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designer, and this could be masked with a much simpler templating
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syntax. So what if we combined the two strengths? Thus, Smarty was
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born...
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</para>
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</preface>
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