----------------------------------- Craige Sat Dec 23, 2006 4:45 pm Templating Engine: avioding bottle neck. ----------------------------------- Technically, this thread could go in the PHP help forum, but I am not asking for help with the language specifically, but rather a code design. Thus, I have posted it here. So my problem is in a potential design for a website templating engine I'm working on for a new site. I was wanting to do a recursive variable replacement function to the class, however my problem is with how to design it. I wanted to do a recursive function, but I'm not sure how much this is going to bottle neck the script on me. The template file which includes a recursive replace might look like so: And what the templating engine would do is take a copy of the entire block, and use it as the template to replace variables in, x number of times. Each time, appending the result block to a static temp variable. The recursive function would work something like so: if first iteration get count of block variables: store in static var get copy of block from temalte and save in static var set static var to represent the iteration function level if ! first iteration, > last iteration replace vars in copy of block by calling self with loop num set to 1 for each var append new block to temp static var call self with loop num set to num - 1 if last iteration I havn't worked it out yet, but it would finalize the iterations, and return true. Add new set of blocks to template I fear this will leave me with a huge bottle neck, which I want to avoid. I haven't worked out how all the code will work yet, but I think you can see what I want to do. Ideas? Opinions? ----------------------------------- wtd Sat Dec 23, 2006 6:11 pm ----------------------------------- I'm curious as to whether this is an academic exercise. Templating engines have been done so many times, and there are so many good ones out there that I fail to see why you wouldn't just learn one of those. Of course, there's nothing wrong with it if it is an academic exercise. I'm just curious. ----------------------------------- Craige Sat Dec 23, 2006 6:31 pm ----------------------------------- Nah. I've never even taken an academic course on programming. This is for personal use. And the reason I don't use a prebuilt templating engine is simply for two reasons: 1) I enjoy learning new thins like this. Every experience helps you out later in life. 2) I generally don't use any prebuilt libraries for my personal, closed source sites. I don't have any problem using them in Open Source things I may do, but if nobody else is going to see and/or modify it (outside of a small team of coders), I prefer the code to be all original. It just means I know it in and out, and can customize it easily. ----------------------------------- wtd Sat Dec 23, 2006 7:41 pm ----------------------------------- For simplicity, I would suggest having your templating code look absolutely nothing like the HTML you plan to embed it in. Consider Perl's Template Toolkit for instance, that uses brackets instead of less-than and greater-than symbols. ----------------------------------- Craige Sat Dec 23, 2006 8:10 pm ----------------------------------- For simplicity, I would suggest having your templating code look absolutely nothing like the HTML you plan to embed it in. Consider Perl's Template Toolkit for instance, that uses brackets instead of less-than and greater-than symbols. Actually, I'm using those due to the fact they are HTML comments. If I don't use a variable for some reason, it gets output as a comment. No big deal. Though in the programming scope of it, I should do something with every variable regardless of whether I want to display something or not.