Re: design patters with mod_perl

[Jonathan Vanasco <suppressed>]

On Sep 13, 2006, at 9:28 AM, Frank Wiles wrote:

>   What I typically recommend to people is that they use a template
>   engine like Template-Toolkit.org.  You simply pass it a Perl data
>   structure and then you have all of the same transformation
>   possibilities as XSLT ( at least as I understand it ).  And if you
>   ever need the data as XML, you simply create a template for
>   that ( or pass a special option to your handlers to return XML,
>   etc. ).

I agree with everything said so far
	Perl Data Structures
	Templating Engines
	only toss into XML if you really want to.  otherwise why bother with  
2x the work?

I go a step further...

	All of my packages return Perl data structures
	The structures are then tossed into an *abstract* template class
	That abstract class wraps several templating engines , and will  
output to any of them on the fly.  This way i can use Petal and  
HTML:: templates with the same app.  I just pass a different render  
flag or set a variable/constant.
	If you did that, you could just wrap something that will parse the  
perl structure into XML (or write a template to do it in your  
langauge of choice )

If you're wondering why I'm wrapping in an abstract class, here's the  
top 5 reasons
	It makes me less 'locked into' a templating engine
	I can trivially switch engines on some pages where there are  
performance concerns ( Petal was killing me on a specific page  
render... but HTML::Template redid it in a fraction of time )
	It's less code to change when I need to switch templating engines
	It's less code to change when I want to switch templating engines
	I've already switched templating engines before, it wasn't fun.

All of the 'web frameworks' do it to offer users better choice.  I do  
it to keep my options open.