Re: Advice Choosing a Templating System

[jdtoronto]

Hi ghettofinger,

Have you realized that you touched one of the religious touch-stones of this community? The choice of a templating system and an application framework has more to do, in many respsects, with good luck rather than good management.

For my own purposes I was using things like FormBuilder and Data::FormValidator to help be get past the 'all hand crafted' stage. I still have one legacy application I support which is now over 60,000 lines of Perl and all of the HTML is done with HEREDOC print statements. Oh boy, is that a beast to maintain. Much of it uses no external modules at all and for some of it CGI.pm is used. THe beginnings of the code must now be over 10 yearrs old - I started it in Perl 4 but it first saw the light of day as my first P5 application. Oh, did I say it does not use strict for which I regularly castigate myself now!

Nowadays my preference is CGI::Application and its related family of modules ( BEWARE - the CGI::Application::Plus family of modules are from DOMIZIO and should be avoided as suggested earlier by merlyn ). It has closely coupled support for Data::FormValidator and uses HTML::Template as its default templating system. HTML::Template might not be the most exoctic of templating systems - it has nothing like the 'oh it was once a mini-language' extensions of Template::Toolkit but is far faster to learn, far easier to teach to HTML coder types and when coupled with Cascading Style sheets has allowed me to produce some huge, highly adaptable, but very easilly maintained intranet applications.

Your mileage may vary, and almost inevitably will. But this environment has been very good to me, is well supported by a group of higly professional coders and has its own website and mailing list.

jdtoronto

[ghettofinger]

I knew that there would be many opinions here and that is why I asked. I was hoping for many opinions, really. I like all of the advice that is given here. I have never seen a community with such well informed and eloquent members.

I also know that once I start with one method I will be very likely to stick with it. I am really starting to ramp up some sites and I want to have them all coded with the same method to ease the administrative burden. I am super glad I asked this question and even more pleased with the response.


ghettofinger