[Petal] Hi Petal Users!

[Holland, Mark]

> 
> I suppose that Petal is still under the shadow of the 
> templating tenors,
> i.e. the template toolkit or even HTML::Template. Plus, it's 
> not gotten
> that much publicity yet. Someday maybe :)
> 

I've always had headaches with templating systems. Most are so painfully
convoluted. I have to say when I saw zope's TAL spec, I wished that someone
would write a perl version, or that my perl skills were good enough to write
something similar myself. Well someone did, and since using petal I no
longer shudder at the thought of writing templates.

Previously I was using Mason's template system which, whilst not terrible,
doesn't really allow for proper separation of code from HTML. I have since
integrated Petal with Mason's component system and it works beautifully.
Each component object automatically picks up it's corresponding template,
and by transparently passing Mason's global $m object to each template I
automatically have access to all sorts of information such as session info
etc..

> 
> > Or maybe it just works so flawlessly, and the documentation is so
> > perfect, that there are no questions?
> 
There are a couple of things I wish petal did, but as far as stability goes
it gets 10/10. The only complaint I might have is speed when it comes to
processing larger, more complex templates. I did read somewhere that you
were going to convert to SAX at some point. Will this improve performance?

That aside, Petal walks all over other template systems and is a brilliant
tool.

Thanks,
Mark

--
Mark Holland
mark at thinkfoo.com