Roy's Techblog

The last few days at work, I’ve been investigating web templating systems and web application development frameworks.

My searching for solutions ran me across quite a number of possibilities for both of these, too many to list really. Instead, I’ll just refer you to this list of MVC frameworks for PHP. Perl has just as many, the foremost being Catalyst.

I still haven’t picked one. I’m going to map our typical application out a bit before I decide if an MVC model suits us. It probably does, but anything we use needs to be:

• simple
• maintainable / easily understood
• effective
• fast to code with

Because I’m not the only one touching the code here, the 1st two points are key to us.

Moving on to templates. There’s even more choices here than for frameworks! I’ve classified them into 3 groups:

1. embedded native code (eg Savant)
2. non-html markup (eg Smarty)
3. XHTML Markup (eg TAL such as ZPT or Petal or PHPTAL)

Right now, TAL looks the most promising because it looks like we can use it from PHP or Perl with the same template file. It also renders in the browser for testing, so creating them with any WYSIWG editor should work fine.