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CromeDome (4395)

CromeDome
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Hello, I'm MrCromeDome from Perl Monks. [perlmonks.org] See my account there or my home page for more info.

Journal of CromeDome (4395)

Friday July 11, 2003
09:06 PM

Templating Modules

[ #13403 ]

In this post on Perl Monks, I think I probably came off sounding a bit more stupid than I probably am (though, I admit I probably should have stated the question better).

To recap briefly, I need to generate a somewhat complex form in Perl. Some really good suggestions for this were presented, and at present, I am evaluating several of them. Further discussion with tilly convinced me that I have a lot more to learn about templating systems.

I am a one man web shop and my place of employment. I do all the design and programming for our few web products. Because our products are deployed for multiple accounts, I needed an easy way of changing the look and feel of each site for each client. And I found and fell in love with HTML::Template. While it helped me to overcome that barrier, I have fallen into some other bad habits that I need to break.

HTML is not a strong suit of mine. Programming is (though as far as things go for me, I still consider myself a Perl novice). And I can do things in Perl (such as producing forms with CGI.pm) that I don't understand all that well in HTML. And so I end up with an ugly, interesting mix of code and pseudo-content that is not all-together well-separated. The little separation I've had though has been sufficient - flexibility in site layout.

Now I find myself working with a web designer on a new project who is completely new to Perl. For the first time I will be forced to give up all my bad habits, but I don't know how :P It's my impression that HTML::Template will work nicely - for what little I've looked at other templating systems, HTML::Template most closely seems to resemble pure HTML, which is all my designer will be capable of doing.

And so I fork() a new learning process. Should anybody reading have some insight to share, it is appreciated.


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  • Personally -- and keeping in mind my low level of experience with other templating systems at this point, I'm going on hearsay and documentation -- I'd say HTML::Template isn't a terrible way to start. It's the first templating module I ever touched, and it's simple enough that you can pick it up in short order and be functional with it pretty quick.

    Now, my understanding is that Text::Template provides more flexibility in the type of things you can generate, and Template Toolkit...does some other things

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    You are what you think.
    • I'm not sure if more power is what I'm looking for, just a way to shed my bad habits. How have you used HTML::Template in the past? Have you been able to completely give up HTML generation with the methods provided by CGI.pm?

      I spent some time after writing the parent entry looking at Template Toolkit. Some very sweet things you can do :) But I still don't see how that is well-suited for not-so-technical web designers. Maybe it's just the couple I've been accustomed to using, but I'm not sure they coul
      • What I know about TT I could fit on the head of a pin, pretty much just that it exists.

        Mason's another creature -- that I know some stuff about, but it's pretty heavy-duty.

        HTML::Template allowed me to get rid of (roughly) 90% of the HTML I was generating. That's a speed increase, plus I suspect I could get a little more picky about what I was importing from CGI and reduce memory overhead. Further, I'd be willing to say that I could have probably just used HTML::Template for HTML and used CGI for form

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        You are what you think.
  • I'm not entirely clear what you're asking or what your bad habits are, but if you're in the habit of using CGI.pm for 'sticky' forms then you ought to take a look at HTML::FillInForm. You can use it to post-process the output from HTML::Template and plug form values back into the HTML - it's magic!
    • The bad habits I keep referring to are using HTML::Template to create a header and footer for each page, then pretty much using CGI.pm to fill in the rest of the page content (tables, forms, etc.).

      I guess maybe what I was looking for was any insight people would like to share as far as their experiences with templating, tips or pitfalls, etc., especially with HTML::Template. I've spent most of my programming time since yesterday looking into what others have done with HTML::Template, and I think that I ma
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