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by Douglas Clifton.
Original Post: December DC PHP Developers Meeting
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I was way overdue and finally made it down to the National Press Building (map) for my first DC PHP Developers group meeting, and I was pleasantly surprised by the turnout. The conference room (#495) was close to standing room only and additional chairs had to be brought down so everyone had a seat. I'm not sure if this was atypical, maybe it had something to do with the presentation. This, in contrast to the Washington Web Standards group meetings, which are very informal and only a handful of people (at best) regularly show up.
I suspect the reason for the strong showing was Keith Casey's presentation on the Smarty templating engine. He was obviously enthusiastic about his recent experiences working with it, and went beyond simple include/if/foreach constructs in your markup, or the "view" side of separating your application into data/code and presentation. Smarty also allows you to create custom filters, or plugins, which boil down to PHP functions that can be used in your templates to deal with special situations.
As ever, I will not mince words. I still cannot see how a "designer" would be any less intimidated by editing templates over markup embedded in a PHP module using here document syntax. I had the same impression I've been seeing for years, being this separation of the "progammer" camp and the frontend designer. To me, Web development is the whole ball of wax. You should understand everything from Internet protocols, server configuration, valid and semantic markup, CSS/presentation, database design, efficiency, security, and so on, or you pigeonhole yourself into one role.
And I didn't even mention client-side stuff like JavaScript/DOM scripting, or XHR.
Another thing that puzzles me are constant references to the MVC paradigm. "This is not a new idea," one that predates the Mac and DOS/Windows, not to mention Linux, by a long shot. MVC is rooted in the research done on GUI design at Xerox/PARC. For a generic overview, MVC is composed of:
Model — Data and the logic to access it (the backend).
View — Presentation or user interface (the frontend).
Controller — Event handlers (most of which is already done by the browser unless you are using scripting).
I admit the latter isn't quite that simple. Server-side code (other than preemptive client-side validation) would include such things as processing form inputs and the security baggage that goes along with it.
My design and development philosophy has always been deeply rooted in the original principles of Unix and KISS. How many layers of abstraction are necessary? Or worse, layer after layer after layer...when does the developer lose all sense of the underlying system? I'm not advocating coding server-side HTTP responses in assembler or C/C++ (which I have done), but when I see programmers writing classes using methods that are nothing but wrappers around PHP functions, which are themselves wrappers around library calls that then make system calls...I hope you see the point of this rant.
However, it was a good presentation and Keith's strongest assertion, one I happen to agree with, is this: If you are going to use a templating engine Smarty is worth considering. It is mature, has a strong and loyal userbase, and is well maintained and documented.
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I was way overdue and finally made it down to the