[Helma-dev] Re: Helma Templating

[tobias.schaefer at orf.at]

hi there

i think i would not be able to improve andreas bolka's statement against all the latest efforts of stepping back (or away) from current helma templating practices.

and i fully support his suggestion to start off with the "february 2005" proposal.

to me the proposed alternative template engines, as excellent an art they might represent, appear to be too "ego-driven", ie. there is only one guy who can handle the resulting code structures -- and that's the one who wrote it. (feel free to correct me here.)

if another template engine should prove anything at all it's that a team of users can easily collaborate with it. that's the case with the current skin&macro implementation of helma. and that's the minimum helma 2.0 should achieve, too.

i know that there is substantially more to do writing macros and skins. but that's actually a smaller amount of work than the one you have to do cleaning up the mess of your colleague's rabid prototyped hsp code.

ciao,
tobi


Andreas Bolka wrote:
> Friday, December 2, 2005, 1:27:36 AM, Juerg wrote:
> 
>> I don't think that if I write a table that repeats its rows as many
>> times as there are elements in a list, it is easier and cleaner to
>> write one main skin for the table, one for the row per element, and
>> one macro that takes the list, iterates through the elements and
>> renders the row skin for each element.
> 
> The "February 2005" proposal would (at least as I understood it)
> allow you to combine all those skins into one bigger skin. The
> iteration logic would stay cleanly seperated in a macro.  
> 
>> I'd like to bring in Rails as an example here once more. The Erb
>> library (Embedded Ruby: http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/erb/ ) used
>> there allows pretty much the same as my current JS template
>> implementation. And still noone is complaining
> 
> Well, ERB is just PHP (or ASP or whatever) gone Ruby. With the same
> advantages and disadvantages. So if "no one complains" (what I doubt)
> that would be only because there is nothing new to complain about.
> It's the same mess as before (only with a language that is generally
> deemed to be sexier).   
> 
> And personally, that's *exactly* the road I don't want to go down (it
> seems Helma still allows to walk those paths with .hsp; my best
> wishes for those who want to do so).