Keith Devens .com

What were the top things you did not like about the Pear ITX templating system?

I'm in a hurry, so real quick off the top of my head:

• A templating system has to have compiled templates. JSP is compiled into actual Java code as a Servlet, for example. Smarty compiles into real PHP code. No way I'm putting up with the overhead of parsing a template (Not even in C (fast), but in PHP (slow)) on every request.
• I didn't like the block system. The author's statement about it that even within a block, if a variable has the same name as another one in a different block ITX can still get confused made me really comfortable about the design of the system.
• The only advantage it had over Smarty seemed to be that the author claimed it was "smaller" and "lighter". It may have fewer features, but it's clearly "heavier" because it has to parse the template on every invocation.

Smarty has caching built in (a plus). The article mentioned something about it, and seemed to indicate that Smarty's system wasn't adequate because it only had time-based expiration, but I don't think it outlined why this was bad nor any alternative to this that ITX offers.

Anyway, all that was enough for me to not be interested in ITX. Plus, I'd never heard of it before, while Smarty is very well known. Smarty wasn't too "heavy" for me, and wasn't difficult to install at all, although getting the permissions right was a little bit hairy, but not difficult once you know the answer (thanks to revjim ).

Wonderful. I guess Smarty will have to do. Do you like anything from pat (Php Application Tools)? In the past, I wanted to use most of their stuff, but -after a while i came to the conclusion that Smarty, ADOdb, and your XML-RPC implementation takes care most of the more important stuff.

Thanks for the link, some of the stuff looks neat. I'll have to look at it in more detail later.