INSPIRATION

Plift was inspired by the template system provided by Lift (hence the name), a web framework for the Scala programming language. They apply a concept called "View-First", which differs from the traditional "Controller-First" concept popularized by the MVC frameworks.

On the "Controller-First" approach, the Controller is executed first, and is responsible for pulling data from the "Model", then making this data available to the "View". This creates a tight coupling between the controller and the final rendered webpage, since it needs to know and gather all data possibly need by the webpage templates. Thats perfect for well defined webapp actions, but not so perfect for creating reusable website components.

On the other hand, a "View-First" framework starts by parsing the view, then executing small, well-defined pieces of code triggered by special html attributes found in the template itself. These code snippets are responsible for rendering dynamic data using the html element (that triggered it) as the data template. That reflects the reality that a webpage is composed by independent, well-defined blocks of dynamic html (surrounded by static html, of course), like a menu, gallery, a list of blog posts or any other content.

Using that approach, a CMS application can provide all sorts of special html elements for template designers to use, like:

<google-map address="..." />

<youtube-video id="..." />

<!-- a form that renders itself -->
<x-form name="contact" />

<blog-list limit="3">
    <!-- html template for list posts here -->
</blog-list>

<gallery limit="3">
    <!-- html template for list posts here -->
</gallery>

<youtube-playlist id="...">
 <!-- html template for list items here -->
</youtube-playlist>

A kind of server-side "Custom Elements").

My frist version of Plift (back in 2013, DarkPAN) implemented only the minimum to execute the "View-First" approach: it could 'include', 'wrap' and call code snippets triggered from html elements. It couldn't even interpolate data by itself. And that proved to be enough to create dozens of corporate websites and (albeit simple) webapps (including our own website http://kreato.com.br, of course). With small annoyances here and there, but haven't been using Template::Toolkit type of engine (for website templating) since then.

This version has a more generic handler dispatcher, and also has the data rendering feature, so we can call it a templating engine. :)

AUTHOR

Carlos Fernando Avila Gratz <cafe@kreato.com.br>