Re: Mason 2.0 thoughts

On Sun, 13 May 2007, Jonathan Swartz wrote:

>> I don't get why people think we'd need something new. This can be done
>> as-is with the current Mason using the component-with-content feature.
>> That's what I was suggesting in my original message.
>
> Sadly, I think components are the wrong place to put this kind of 
> functionality.
>
> I've never liked or used CWC very much, and I believe one of the reasons is 
> the same reason that Dave started putting form handling in subroutines (first 
> with MasonX::WebApp, then with Catalyst). Many potential blocks/tags/filters 
> - i.e. higher order functions that take a piece of Mason template as an 
> argument and process it in some way - will be all or mostly pure-Perl, and 
> thus cleaner to write with a subroutine or method than with a component.

I totally agree. In my Mason 2.0 notes, I mentioned that I wanted to 
extend the CWC feature to allow calling a subroutine, something like how 
TT2 does filters.

  <&| caching_subroutine(), ... &>

  [content]

  </&>

Which is a lot like TT:

  [% USE foo = Filter::Foo %]
  [% FILTER foo(...) %]

  some content

  [% END %]

> So IMO it would be great to have a special syntax for these filters (or to 
> co-opt an existing syntax like <% %>), a syntax that was nestable, and not 
> line-based, and able to handle arbitrary Perl arguments.

THe CWC syntax is exactly that syntax!

> Given that, it is somewhat unfortunate IMO that we came up with CWC first, 
> because such a new syntax would be blamed for cluttering the Mason language 
> unnecessarily, whereas in retrospect I'd rather have a module-based filter 
> syntax than CWC.

I think we're on basically the same page. I'm just saying that we can use 
the syntax we have, but extend it to allow calling subroutines, 
components, and "named" filters. Now, I don't know exactly how we'd 
distinguish all of them, but I like the idea.


-dave

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