On Mon, 26 Dec 2005 14:17:00 +0100 Joachim Zobel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I think it makes sense to use Apache filtering to seperate the > presentation layer. The idea is to have an application layer that > outputs xml and a template engine attached by filtering that merges > the xml into html pages. > > What is already there? Are there any template engines that can be > attached through filtering? Is there any spec. for an interface xml? > What are the cons of this approach? Separating your application like that is a great idea, most large applications do this type of separation inside of the app itself. While I haven't heard of anyone doing this in practice, I have at times thought about it. It would be fairly trivial to write a filter that takes XML input and rework it so that it can be passed into a templating engine like Template Toolkit. The only real drawback is that you've got the extra encode/decode cycle going on. Assuming you gather your data into some complex data structure, convert it to XML and then output it. You then have to convert the XML back into a perl data structure and then pass it to the template engine. This could cause significant performance problems depending on your hardware/traffic. If your app interfaces with a lot of various applications, uses REST/SOAP/XML-RPC, etc. extensively then it might be more worthwhile to do this, allowing you to completely separate your "internal" logic/data from the outside world. Another option entirely is using XSLT to do your transformation between XML and HTML. There is a plugin for Template Toolkit for this even. --------------------------------- Frank Wiles <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.wiles.org ---------------------------------
