At 11:39 30/10/2002 -0500, Jesse Erlbaum wrote:
Hi John --
> Quasi-seriously, as someone who has had to maintain mountains of bad
> perl code, I know TMTOWTDI can have a downside; but the openness of the
> language is what has lead to its greatness ...
This doesn't have to be as big a problem as it often is. Having coding
standards makes a big difference no matter WHICH language you use. Have you
ever seen bad Java code? Java has reached parity with Perl in that area,
for sure! This is a problem in ANY language. You just can't "hire smart
people" and send them out there without direction.
I completely agree. Bad code is bad code in any languaje (well, perhaps
with perl you can write the most encrypted code, but only if you are
looking for it).
I don't really know the ability of PHP to work with templates, but since I
discovered Template Toolkit 2, I've never written (nor will I) more web
applications without it. I cannot understand why don't want them to use
HTML templates. I suspect, the propietary languaje the were using was
similar in concept to PHP or ASP not allowing templates.
Oscar Serrano.
At my company we base all our work on CGI::Application and HTML::Template to
solve exactly this problem. CGI-App and HTML-Tmpl (or Template Toolkit --
TT is compatible with C::A) "strongly suggest" a standard way of writing the
uninteresting bits of a web application -- namely, state management and HTML
separation. They go beyond what is provided by simply making a decision to
use a particular API, such as CGI, mod_perl, PHP, Mason, etc.
No software library will factor this problem out entirely. This is really
a human problem -- not a software problem. However, choosing a specific
tactic is a good start.
TTYL,
-Jesse-
--
Jesse Erlbaum
The Erlbaum Group
jesse@xxxxxxxxxxx
Phone: 212-684-6161
Fax: 212-684-6226
