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Web Development - The Line Between Code and Content?
markmcb asks: "I help design a LAMP web site and I'm constantly plagued by trying to decide on what level should I separate functional code and markup. Depending on what you read, some say embedding HTML in your PHP scripts [or Perl, or Java, or Ruby, or Python, etc] is bad while others say it's no big deal. However, seldom are any practical applications of such code cited. How is your site built? Do you mix HTML with your code? If not, how do you overcome the simple and easy method of doing so? Lastly, what performance gains/losses have you noticed by doing so?"
Business logic would use the driver API, making data requests that were resource-neutral. In other words, the business logic didn't care where the data came from, only that it got what it asked for. Different business functions were isolated, and each presented its own API to the applications. The APIs themselves conformed to a specification. That way, apps written by different developers could perform the same business functions without recoding everything. The applications made requests of the business logic according to the spec, then presented the results to the clients for formatting (web, RSS, PDF, whatever). Uniform data structures were used throughout.
You may not need that level of sophistication, but it sure as heck helped us prototype, isolate employee functions and skills, etc etc. It allowed us to run multiple OSes (Windows, Linux, Solaris) and multiple languages (.NET, VB, and Java) together seamlessly. It also helped when doing architecture, since it forced us to think about what a particular piece of code was really doing. Under our scheme, PHP would be layer 4, and HTML layer 5, so we would separate them. You could just as easily use PHP to generate XML, for example.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
The Smarty template engine offers a flexible and powerful tool for PHP developers.
Where/when I choose to use templates versus embedded code depends on where in a web application the page is viewed. For example, I would use templates on the frontend of complicated sites that require pages to have different page displays, such as a newspaper. A regular news story may display differently from an editorial or op/ed piece. I also think the frontend of a website should be flexible because redesigns happen often.
But I embed HTML on the backend because the admin control panels are more functional than asthetic. Also, the backend pages are more critical than frontend pages and I want admin pages to be self-contained (not reliant on templates that may or may not work or contain errors).
If a user screws up a frontend template, the worst thing that can happen is that the page is unavailable until fixed. But if a user screws up a backend/admin page template, you're can't even access the backend to fix the problem.