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Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2012 22:45:37 -0400
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Object oriented page templates in PHP
From: tom@punkave.com (Tom Boutell)

There is probably a performance hit there when your view offers a lot
of methods, but that is nevertheless a very clever solution (:

On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 9:51 PM, Jared Williams
<jared.williams1@ntlworld.com> wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Tom Boutell [mailto:tom@punkave.com]
>> Sent: 09 April 2012 16:10
>> To: PHP Internals
>> Subject: [PHP-DEV] Object oriented page templates in PHP
>>
>> There has been talk of making PHP a better templating
>> language. After all, it did start out there.
>>
>> Folks have mentioned ideas like making it easier to output
>> escaped content, etc., but these are all hardcoded solutions.
>> And one of the biggest problems with PHP as a template
>> language is that when best practices change, you're stuck
>> with the helper functions you already have unless you start
>> globally replacing things. You can't really subclass or
>> override a function.
>>
>> So even frameworks that provide "helper functions" in the
>> vein of Symfony 1 (which borrowed the idea from Rails) get
>> stuck when you want to alter the behavior.
>>
>> Last year I did a project in a one-off MVC framework of my
>> own in which I decided I didn't want to be stuck with that,
>> so I made a rule:
>> anything I wanted to call from the template had to be a
>> method of $this, the view object in whose render() method the
>> template file was require()'d.
>>
>> This turned out to be a good thing. By writing <?php
>> $this->escape($foo) ?>, I was able to benefit from whatever
>> implementation of 'escape' the subclass of view in question
>> decided to supply to me.
>>
>> But of course it is very verbose and a templating language
>> that is too tedious to use won't get used.
>>
>> What if PHP supported a short tag for calling a method of $this?
>>
>> Then one could write:
>>
>> <?@escape($foo) ?>
>>
>> And 'escape' could be upgraded and modified as needed in an
>> object oriented way without the need to type <?php $this-> many
> times.
>>
>> A problem with this proposal is that it does not address
>> nesting. One still has to write:
>>
>> <?@addLinks($this->escape($foo)) ?>
>>
>> And it is fairly common to combine such operations.
>>
>> So maybe I should just define a sublimetext shortcut for:
>>
>> <?php $this->
>>
>> And be done with it. (: It detracts from readability relative
>> to a template language like Twig, but I can always choose to use
> Twig.
>>
>> This would be notably easier if PHP, like Java and C++,
>> called methods of the current object implicitly without the
>> need for $this->. But of course that would be too great a
>> change as there would be no way to make existing code work
>> correctly again if it reasonably expected
>> implode() to call the usual PHP function and not a method.
>> Plus it's probably a real pain to implement in general.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>
> $fn =3D [
> 'escape' =3D> function($text) { return htmlspecialchars($text,
> ENT_QUOTES|ENT_HTML5, 'UTF-8'); },
> ...
> ];
> extract($fn);
>
> <?=3D$escape('blah')?>
>
> Do I think it's a good idea? =A0Probably not in this case.
>
> Jared
>
>



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Tom Boutell
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