Stephen, since you ask:
FWIW, I think Karl's design for ACS4 templating was pretty close to
ideal. But that's an armchair analysis, not one from experience. For
those who have worked with it, what was it like?
Well, I've had moderate experience using the ACS 4 templating system,
and it is fine. Quite useful, and really fairly simple.
At one point, I dug into how it actually worked, as I had a registered
filter doing some special-purpose access control checking across
thousands of URLs, which needed to tie into the templating system in
order to serve nicely templated "acess denied" pages and the like.
Hm, here, I saved a code snippet - I ended up doing something like
this:
# These all give the correct absolute unix pathname to the
# denied-access template:
#set file_root "[ns_info pageroot]/../templates/denied-access"
#set file_root "[get_server_root]/templates/denied-access"
set file_root [template::util::url_to_file {/templates/denied-access}]
set args [list title $title context_bar $context_bar page_content $page]
set output [template::adp_parse $file_root $args]
db_release_unused_handles
ns_return 403 text/html $output
When I was digging into the templating code in order to really
understand how to do the above, my feeling was that the code could
have been somewhat better commented, and that the piece that does the
walking up and down the tree of included master templates could
probably have been made more general - I seem to vaguely remember
that, as written, it works only for the usual case where you start off
with a *.tcl / *.adp pair in the file-system - not when you
call into the templating system procs from some Tcl code that you're
writing, like I was doing in the example above.
But those are trivial quibbles, irrelevent to probably 99.9% of the
uses to which the templating system is put. So basically, I don't
know 'nothin about XML or XSLT, but the ACS 4 templating system struck
me as an excellent tool.
Oh yeah, and back when I still worked at aD, I remember hearing one of
the aD London developers talk about the graphical-design process used
on one their client projects. Apparently, the client's graphic
designers all used some fancy Mac-based HTML editor which has hoooks
of some sort for foreign (non-HTML) tags.
So somebody (one of the aD developers, I believe), wrote some stuff
for those hooks which accomplished two things: One, the Mac program
now "knew about" the templating system tags and would not bash them up
when editing .adp files. And two, these hooks would insert fake stub
data, so for example the <multiple> tag would show with five
rows of bogus data, to give the graphic designers an idea of how the
final product would look when like and database-backed.
From what I heard, this was a wildly successfull example of
separating the graphic design from the programming - frequently a
source of great friction on web projects. And these
graphic designers loved it too - not just the programmers.
