What is it?

DtTemplate is a community offering from DeRose Technologies which offers promising flexibility to php application developers. Though initially designed for our own internal use we feel that this library is versatile enough for use by many other application developers, and as such have decided to donate our library to the community. Though there are other libraries that exist to solve the same set of problems, we designed DtTemplate library as an alternative because of a number of shortcomings we felt were present in their most of their design strategies.

How is it different?

The philosophy behind our approach is simple , we wanted to design a presentation formatting aid and NOT a separate programming language. We have very few language constructs , and we have no direct computational formatters. As this library targets php developers, any programmatic constructs are to be contained within the traditional <? and ?> tags , and are dispatched to the Zend interpreter for processing.

Specifically, we had in our template library the following design goals:

• Simplicity - All templates should be immediately obvious to the web designers who look at them, and should be easily constructed with a minimal investment of time.

• Speed - The library should incur as little processing overhead as possible. Many hours were spent with the Zend profiling tool to accomplish this goal and it would appear that our current implementation has succeeded towards this end. Our templates are compiled, and we ship the library itself compiled with the Zend Safe Guard Suite for maximum runtime performance.

• Loosely typed syntax - like the php language itself, we want our implementation to permit forgiving and open-ended design by its template designers.

• LGPL - We see the potential in our code, and we want to make sure that you do as well. We want this code base to give something back to a community from which we have received so much, so feel free to inspect and modify our meticulously crafted code!

• I18 support - Though there's not much in here in the way of locale-specific resources, we need to ensure that all our error messages are customizable and regionally comprehensible. In fact, our I18 library is based off of the same DtTemplate library it supports! This library itself is a powerful accessory for use in your applications.

What Next?

If you'd like to see some examples of our template in actual production use, view the source code under our 'Accession for php' example applications. Or, to get started immediately check out our Developer Guide.