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Web Application Design Patterns
Posted by Nick on 2009-09-18 at 8:34 AM
I was speaking to a PHP developer recently on the architecture of their web applications, out of morbid curiosity. We were discussing templating systems, and found out that they created theirs in house. It was a coded document, with classes defined for each entity, and they'd load up an object with the proper properties, stream it out to the processor, and it would generate the page. They would then have the designers just write CSS to make the markup do what they wanted it to do.

I had never heard of this before, and to me, that sounds horrible. You have a huge cost for all of that object creation, and then you have to find a web developer who is willing to only use CSS.

Anyone else do something similar?
Tags: programming design php
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dpu wrote on 2010-01-11 at 3:27 PM
I'm in the middle of developing a web app in PHP right now (fastest way to get a prototype out - probably rewrite in Java later), and instead of rolling out a complete templating class/subsystem, I'm just taking a page from WordPress and allowing PHP in the templates. For security (such as it is), the templates are loaded from within a class, and only the class methods are available along with a few utility functions. This is closed-source for the moment, and theming is done in-house, so we're not too concerned for the moment with completely locking things down.

The good news is that there's virtually no extra overhead involved, web designers can use PHP plus a published set of methods internal to the application, and the parent class retains the ability to filter theme files. The bad news is that security is through obscurity for now.
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