Smarty

[phrax]

First off, I'm a big fan of Smarty!
I prefer to use it to handle the display logic, and have PHP handle the application logic.

Rasmus did a presentation for our little php group (vancouver.php.net) last week. He mentioned that he doesn't know why people need a templating library for php. "PHP is a templating system".

A collegue at work also shares a similar opinion. I have a hard time trying to argue the advantages a templating engine provides over having HTML with straight PHP encoded into it.

What do you guys think?

I find that for larger projects, with a lot of application logic, Smarty really shines. For smaller products, using include() to bring in HTML (with embeded php) is fine.

When somebody says, "What is the point of smarty, if you can do it in PHP" what kind of answers do you guys give?

And where does PHP stop and Smarty begin? Cause won't people eventually start asking for for loops, while loops, etc. etc. ? Won't you be re-inventing PHP again?

Ben.

[AZTEK]

Though I have great respect for Rasmus I would have to disagree. PHP alone couldn't make templating as easy and extendable as Smarty has.
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"Imagine a school with children that can read and write, but with teachers who cannot, and you have a metaphor of the Information Age in which we live." -Peter Cochrane

[joscha]

[AZTEK]

[phrax]

Good suggestions.
For Rasmus, working at Yahoo and all, they code a lot of their functionality in C/C++, so PHP would be their templating layer. For people like me who write all of my application logic in PHP, Smarty makes more sense.

Rasmus did give us insight into how incredibly inefficient include() and include_once(), require, require_once are. I wonder how fast smarty is vs PHP includes...

Ben.