[Petal] Re: help for cpan modules etc..

[Steve Purkis]

On Dec 12, 2004, at 03:01, Terrence Brannon wrote:

> Steve Purkis <steve.purkis at multimap.com> writes:
>
>> On Oct 7, 2004, at 08:07, Andy Wardley wrote:
>>
>>> Steve Purkis wrote:
>>>> Perhaps we'll finally see Petal & TT2 [3?] working together...
>
> Help me out here. If I'm developing a website, Imight have XHTML
> templates on disk and my view, controller amd model logic written in
> Perl. As tt2 is a tool for view logic, it seems to be an alternative 
> for
> petal, not something that would work with it.

At the moment, it is an alternative.  That's the problem, IMHO.

The thing is, they are both templating systems -- they both parse 
templates, create cached copies of them, and render them.  They even 
have a similar invocation syntax.

 From the user's POV, the only thing that differs is the syntax.  In an 
ideal world, Petal would just be a flavour of TT3, which from my 
understanding, is simply an engine for writing templating systems that 
have different syntax.  So the idea is: share the common foundation, 
and keep the different template languages.

The idea is this kind of engineering change would be transparent to 
users - they wouldn't realize or even care that they're using the TT3 
engine.  But they'd benefit from it's features (f.e: better template 
debugging hooks).  And the engineers would have less code to maintain - 
definitely a good thing.

BTW, Andy Wardley has just released an alpha of TT3:

	http://tt3.template-toolkit.org/

If anyone has time to start working with Andy with a view to 
integrating Petal into TT3, I'm sure the community would appreciate it.
(I'm snowed in at work, otherwise I'd volunteer :-/)


> I'm sure that there are entire websites developed with MkDoc that did
> not use/need tt2 at all...

Yes, that's true.  But hopefully the above explains why this isn't 
really an issue.

-Steve