Smarty Development

Smarty is a PHP template engine. It can be more accurately described as 'Template/Presentation Framework' in the sense that it facilitates a manageable way to separate application logic and content from its presentation providing the programmer and template designer with a wealth of tools to automate tasks commonly dealt with at the presentation layer of an application. Smarty parses the templates and generates web content (PHP scripts) out of it by placing special tags within a document. These tags are processed and substituted with other code. When the web page is viewed, Smarty compiles templates into PHP scripts behind the scenes, eliminating run-time parsing of templates.

Smarty also provides fine-grained caching features for caching all or parts of a rendered web page thus saving the overhead expense involved in retrieving the data from a data source. Programmers can register template functions as cacheable or non-cachable, group cached pages into logical units for easier management.

Basic Features of Smarty

Some of the notable features of Smarty include:

• It is very fast.
• It is easy to use and maintain since the PHP Parser does the dirty work.
• No template parsing overhead, only compiles once.
• It is smart about recompiling only the template files that have changed.
• Smarty comes with a built-in debugging.
• You can make custom functions and custom variable modifiers so the template language is extremely extensible.
• Smarty comes with numerous presentation tools, minimizing the application code and resulting in quicker, less error-prone application development/deployment.
• Configurable template delimiter tag syntax, so you can use {}, {{}}, , etc.
• The if/elseif/else/endif constructs are passed to the PHP parser, so the {if ...} expression syntax can be as simple or as complex as you like.

Digicorp has extensive experience in developing robust applications using Smarty framework. We use Smarty to enhance the performance and security of web based applications.