Choosing A Templating System For Your Web Project

Choosing A Templating System For Your Web Project

By Tom Hukins
Date: Thursday, 24 July 2003 16:00
Duration: 20 minutes
Language:

Good advice on choosing templating systems from a technical perspective
already exists. This talk does not focus on the technical aspects of
different templating systems, but instead looks at the different types
of Web project that exist, the different people who might be involved in
a Web project, and how these things determine which templating system
you should choose.

In short, the templating system you should choose depends very much on
the project in hand.

The first part of this talk looks at how the scope of the project
affects the templating system to choose. Some sites interface with
simple data structures stored in a relational database: others display
complex structured content stored in XML.

The second part of this talk describes the different people who might
make up a project team, the skills they might have, and what they might
look for in a templating system. Such types of people may include:
- Project managers
- HTML developers
- Graphic designers
- Perl programmers
- Systems administrators
- Database developers and administrators
- Content authors and editors
- Experts in usability, quality assurance, information architecture and
other areas

Finally, the talk compares four different templating systems
(HTML::Template, Mason, Template Toolkit, XSLT). Each system has
particular strengths that best suit different types of project.
Different groups of people with different skills work best with
different templating systems.