[Klug-general] Web Scripting Languages

Matthew Macdonald-Wallace matthew at truthisfreedom.org.uk
Sun Jan 7 21:49:33 GMT 2007


On Sun, 2007-01-07 at 20:22 +0000, Mike Evans wrote:
> MacGyveR wrote:
> > On Saturday 06 Jan 2007 22:30, Karl Lattimer wrote:
> > 
> > anyway this argument is void as why would you want to mix programming logic 
> > with HTML layout?
> > 
> > you want to abstract these layers.
> > 
> Indeed you do want to abstract these layers, and most of the 
> technologies in use have been trying to get the boundary right for 
> sometime.  (JSP and its friends.)
> 
> So you start off with just a servlet and you end up having to come up 
> with things which output bits of HTML.  That was hard - especially if 
> you have lots of HTML and a bit of active content.  So then you go for 
> something like ASP/JSP, which switches the focus the other way so that 
> you write the HTML and put in scriptlets where you just need a bit of 
> code.  Sadly that doesn't work terribly well either unless your code is 
> very simple.
> 
> Enter the taglib - a way of hiding your code to make it look like it's 
> HTML.  Well fine - but we're not fooling anyone really are we? This is 
> about as good as it gets in my experience, but the level of abstraction 
> is far from complete and it's hard to see how it could get any better.
> 
> Everything else I've seen just complicates matters by separating things 
> more to the point where you pick up an application and unless you can 
> digest several complex configuration files simultaneously (way beyond me 
> I'm afraid) you're completely flummoxed.

My current system is as follows:

All content is held in a MySQL database
All formatting is done by CSS
All html output and processing logic is created by PHP

This is about as close as I can get with my knowledge to complete layer
seperation as I understand it (logic, content and presentation all
separate) and it appears to work, but it was a headache to create.

> Admittedly I'm not a front end specialist.  (Back end stuff more my 
> thing.) So I'd be interested to hear other's experiences if it's not 
> taking the thread too far off topic.
> 
> I can see the pub on Friday might lead to some interesting discussion :-)

Wish I could be there, can't get to Maidstone, so I'll have to meet you
all in Canterbury either at the end of this month or next.

Cheers,

Matt



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