> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tom Boutell [mailto:t...@punkave.com]
> Sent: 09 April 2012 16:10
> To: PHP Internals
> Subject: [PHP-DEV] Object oriented page templates in PHP
>
> There has been talk of making PHP a better templating
> language. After all, it did start out there.
>
> Folks have mentioned ideas like making it easier to output
> escaped content, etc., but these are all hardcoded solutions.
> And one of the biggest problems with PHP as a template
> language is that when best practices change, you're stuck
> with the helper functions you already have unless you start
> globally replacing things. You can't really subclass or
> override a function.
>
> So even frameworks that provide "helper functions" in the
> vein of Symfony 1 (which borrowed the idea from Rails) get
> stuck when you want to alter the behavior.
>
> Last year I did a project in a one-off MVC framework of my
> own in which I decided I didn't want to be stuck with that,
> so I made a rule:
> anything I wanted to call from the template had to be a
> method of $this, the view object in whose render() method the
> template file was require()'d.
>
> This turned out to be a good thing. By writing <?php
> $this->escape($foo) ?>, I was able to benefit from whatever
> implementation of 'escape' the subclass of view in question
> decided to supply to me.
>
> But of course it is very verbose and a templating language
> that is too tedious to use won't get used.
>
> What if PHP supported a short tag for calling a method of $this?
>
> Then one could write:
>
> <?@escape($foo) ?>
>
> And 'escape' could be upgraded and modified as needed in an
> object oriented way without the need to type <?php $this-> many
times.
>
> A problem with this proposal is that it does not address
> nesting. One still has to write:
>
> <?@addLinks($this->escape($foo)) ?>
>
> And it is fairly common to combine such operations.
>
> So maybe I should just define a sublimetext shortcut for:
>
> <?php $this->
>
> And be done with it. (: It detracts from readability relative
> to a template language like Twig, but I can always choose to use
Twig.
>
> This would be notably easier if PHP, like Java and C++,
> called methods of the current object implicitly without the
> need for $this->. But of course that would be too great a
> change as there would be no way to make existing code work
> correctly again if it reasonably expected
> implode() to call the usual PHP function and not a method.
> Plus it's probably a real pain to implement in general.
>
> Thoughts?
>
$fn = [
'escape' => function($text) { return htmlspecialchars($text,
ENT_QUOTES|ENT_HTML5, 'UTF-8'); },
...
];
extract($fn);
<?=$escape('blah')?>
Do I think it's a good idea? Probably not in this case.
Jared
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