Smarty on PHP5 [was: php5 Iterators]

--- Monte Ohrt <[email protected]> wrote:
> With PHP 5 on the rise I agree that it is time for a rewrite with PHP
> 5 OO features in mind. Some of the things I'd like to see are the
> ability to instantiate Smarty with limited feature sets (cache
> display only, no caching, no compiling, no debugging, etc.), and
> making parts of the  engine modular (such as the template compiler.)
> A lot of Smarty code is written in ways to maximize PHP 4 speed that
> should be cleaned up. I don't think that BC with Smarty 2.x will be a
> major importance, or even feasible in some cases.

Agreed. I think a big question to answer is how much of the so-called
"framework" arena should Smarty attempt to implement. Presently, Smarty
provides quite a bit on that front without going to the whole way to
providing a complete solution. I'd almost rather see separate projects
for each of those features (perhaps not that extreme) with the main
class simply being a glue class. At the moment, Smarty is a compiler, a
resource handler, a plugin system and a filter chain, a content caching
system as well as a runtime interface and security mechanism. I'd vote
to have PHP5 native features used wherever possible to avoid
redundancy. For example, I think that Smarty resource handling should
be dropped in favour of using native PHP resources. That would also
eliminate filters and probably the caching mechanism. There should only
be one interface to send "data" into templates so I think that config
files should be dropped; on-the-other-hand having a pluggable interface
(for example, one that allowed for callbacks in-place-of assigments)
would be very nice. I think my favourite feature in Smarty is the
plugin interface, so to see that enhanced so that it plays a bigger
role seems appropriate to me. 

xo boots