Another thought about templates

[Luke E. <leh...@cs...>]

i've been thinking about templating as well, and I think we are trying to go
too complex.  PHP has limits, and I think we need to recognize these limits
and not try to make our app do whiz-bang things that PHP crawls on.

My thoughts are that perhaps our 3-tier model for templating is flawed.  I
suppose this isn't so much a PHP flaw, but would be a design flaw.  The
controllers are a cool idea in concept, but in essance, they would be
mini-programs of their own (yes, I know I was the one to suggest
this).  While this model offers a lot of flexibility, I don't think it will
ever get utilized.

The reason I bring this up is because I'm currently reworking SquirrelMail
for my employer to integrate better into our product.  As I"m doing this,
I'm finding that it's not really that dificult.  The whole reasoning for
creating a controller was to make it easier to integrate.  At least in my
case, this would make it MORE dificult.

I think we should take a few steps back and look at some plans we had
originally (using FastTemplate) to do basic templating.  When we started
thinking about the rewrite, the main focus was going to be the modular
back-end APIs, and I think that is where our main focus should
be.  Templating to the extent we were starting to think of might not be a
good idea.

However, we DO need to do a better job with separating display from logic in
the code.  But I am starting to think that a controller is not the way to do
it.

This one will probably be a bit more controversial, so please feel free to
argue with me.  (:

Luke
--
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   . .   Luke Ehresman - "Codito, ergo sum"
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