Posted by Steve Manes on 04/07/05 17:02

Vicente Werner wrote:
> All I can say is that certainly they haven't seriously evaluated
> smarty, you can use it pretty much in the same way than Xtemplate,
> template power or any other "just replace the vars" template system
> out there. Said that, the real advantage of smarty is that it let's
> you separate the presentation logic from bussines logic, not just the
> html code, but also higher order process related to output like
> trasnlation, creation of tables, etc... in order to let you change
> your presentation without 0 changes on your bussines logic.

Absolutely. We use Smarty for Trafficmac (www.trafficmac.com) which
handles all the online ad server reporting for the Wall Street
Journal/CBS Marketwatch, SmartMoney, Foxnews.com, Cars.com,
Dictionary.com, MSN-Europe and others. These are really data-heavy
sites with lots of massive tables, report generators and so forth. The
back-end PHP code would be a complete mess without the ability to throw
a database result set to Smarty for visualization. Our DHTML API is
almost totally dependent on Smarty... which is a long way of saying that
table generation *is* a presentation, not back-end, task.

For the same reason, we keep the business logic in the database, in
PostgreSQL procs. It's all about using the right tool for the right job.

[Back to original message]