Progressive display -- small hack towards it

[Not ME]

It would be way cool to be able to send the result to the web server progressively as the data is acquired; in particular, for slow running SQL query results display.

Unfortunately, the current architecture would not allow it, I have some alternate design in preparation for it, but it's far from there yet.

What I plan to do RSN is to be able to send the beginning of the file UP TO the first dynamic parameter to a given filehandle, so that the user sees that something's coming. This will solve problem such as users cancelling the page download earlier, and will make sites appear snappier.

Example:

my $tmpl = HTML::Template->new(filename=>'template.html', displayto => \*STDOUT);

What do you think?

This is not always desirable, such as in cases where an error could occur; but then, it'd be better to display the beginning, and then have:

<TMPL_IF error>
<p>An error has occured!</p>
<TMPL_ELSE>
<TMPL_LOOP results>
<p><TMPL_VAR value></p>
</TMPL_LOOP>
</TMPL_IF>

[Sam Tregar]

The problem with this is that HTML::Template has no way to know when its ok to output a chunk of template until you actually call output().  Unless you place arbitrary restrictions - like no calling param() with the same NAME twice - I don't see how this can work.

-sam