Monthly Archives: March 2003

The Smart Template Engine at SmartPHP looks impressive. It uses more traditional templating conventions than Smarty (ie. begin … end) which is *much* simpler for non-techies to understand.
This is one library I’m going to keep an eye on. I wonder how hard it’d be to support both in b2-smarty as the PHP code used to run them is very similar.

Via the Linux.ie webdev list, SWIG and PHP4. Someone asked if you could interface PHP code to a C++ API. Looks like this could be a winner!

I’ve thought about this for a while after posting my previous attempt at using MVC to design a registration form.
So far, I’ve removed the need for the fields array, and simply used the Smarty “include” function to include html code for text boxes and checkboxes.
I also changed the controller so I could pass the names of different model and view classes to it. The controller should really create different view and model classes for each view IMO but that might be overkill for this. It’ll be a challenge when it comes to more non-linear apps where it’ll make sense to put code into seperate files.

Thank you Bruno for your comments. I think having as minimal a view class as possible is good and desirable considering the power of Smarty templates! The Template becomes the view class in other words.

Here’s a good description of the different components of the MVC architecture. There’s also a good page on Controller design.