For a few years now, I've been thinking about doing a ::Tiny job on the Template Toolkit. But it was never quite a big enough problem to be worthwhile, because Template.pm doesn't have any particularly horrendous dependencies and always seems like a reasonable way to spend 2.2meg of RAM.
But for Padre 2.2meg is a hell of a lot to spend, because of the multiplier effect of threading. Template.pm is geared much more towards being a load focal point in a website or a content generation system, it is just that much too complex when used as a utility class for simple code generation (which is what I want to use it for in Padre).
So Template::Tiny is happening, and I've just uploaded the first release which support pretty much nothing other than basic [% foo %] insertions from a single variable HASH.
Just adding support for tags, plus a tiny bit of boilerplate, has memory consumption at around 24k of RAM consumed out of my anticipated budget of around 100k.
Before I go any further, I'd like to ask you guys what you consider to be the essential TT features that you would want to retain even in a light weight ::Tiny context.
For me, this includes the three basic array, hash and object foo.bar usages, and IF blocks (and potentially simple | filters).
What do you want?
For it to be useful, I really think it needs loops.
<table>
[% FOR item IN items %]
<tr><td>[% item.name %]</td><td>[% item.value %]</td>
[% END %]
</table>
I work hard (usually) to ensure there is no logic in my templates, but I can't do without loops. And it needs to be easily upgradeable to Template::Toolkit.
That being said, many people will be upset about the whitespace issues of the above. There are obvious ways of dealing with this for the general case (what if an entire line is nothing but template directives?), but I think that's all you're looking for here.
Re:Loops
Ovid on 2009-12-06T21:21:43
Er, pretend I didn't miss out on a closing "tr" tag
:) Re:Loops
bart on 2009-12-08T10:54:04
And filters. I may not imagine the bad things that would happen if
item.nameand/oritem.valuecontain text with substrings that are meaningful as HTML markup.Besides, for a template system I want to be able to insert text between every listed item, but not after the final item; just like
joindoes in Perl, but then with a loop-ish instead of a functional syntax. (Just being able to test for the last iteration in the loop, would do the trick.)I don't remember the syntax TT2 uses for such a feature, but I'm pretty sure it can do it.
Re:Loops
Ovid on 2009-12-08T12:40:56
Template Toolkit's syntax:
[% item.name | html %]
loops
variable substitution (of course)
simple config (where templates are found and the like)
maybe the "include" function as well
If T::Tiny doesn't have some looping construct, I don't see the advantage over a simple eval or string interpolation.
These have all been mentioned, but I just wanted to add one more voice:
