Re: [PHP3] PHP Template Engine spec revision0.52

Hi all (in both lists...)!

    Wooh! You, Zeev, just said a mouthful.

    Speaking for myself, I have to agree with the bulk of what you have to say. Everybody and their grandmother (and grandfather) is getting into the web business nowadays. But for every marketing idea there generally has to be a developer (or 50) behind it to actually make the product fly. I don't know a single developer who doesn't have more work than they know what to do with. As a result, we have alot more entry level internet developers than ever and, to go with it, a huge clamor for simplified developement tools. We've got Drumbeat 2k, NetObjects, Visual Interdev (gack!)...etc, etc...and all of  them now boast the ability to do serverside work. Database searches, some e-commerce stuff, you name it.

    And all of those tools spit out some really, really dense, barely usable code...mostly .asp pages. Ever try to edit .asp or javascript that's been generated by Drumbeat? Looking at serverside VBScript is generally not a pleasing thing, but the stuff these things kick out is just painful. And therefore slow as Hell to execute. I mean, yeah, yeah, .asp's aren't great but well coded .asp pages execute just fine. It's my personal belief that the .asp platform, in general, is dog-like in speed not neccesarily (sp?) because of the underlying technology but because of the SIMPLIFYING of the development process. All the WYSIWYG's are chuck full of generic code that makes it possible to do alot of things not well, but OK.

    And MSoft made sure it happened that way. They traded performance for a grab at market share. But now it's biting them in the ass. There are some big sites that are dying due to lousy .asp code & implementation (not to mention being saddled with a huge NT server farm to keep up with the load). I, for one, would hate to see that happen to PHP. I dropped .asp's like a rock after I learned the most basic PHP syntax. Why? Well, speaking as one with a photography background (read: no programming at all), the syntax is easy, it executes fast and is insanely versatile. My development time, coding by hand, is light years ahead of developing .asp in a WYSIWIG or even database VB apps in Visual Studio.

    A simple templating system is cool. To be honest, I have not looked at the template engine spec. Nor, I suspect, would I understand it much if I did. And I'm sure the template engine folks have their hearts in the right place, as well. I just want to make sure that, in the rush to make PHP more popular, we don't shoot ourselves in the foot. PHP is plenty easy, plenty powerful and very popular. It's ever increasing server, mind and publicity share back that up.

Right, no more rants (or coffee) for me...

Thanks for your time,
- Erik