README

Like Smarty, but faster

Why?

At Skrz.cz, the largest Czech best-prices search engine, we heavily use Smarty. However, Smarty's official implementation ceased to meet our needs, mainly regarding performance.

Skrz\Templating\Engine is Smarty syntax-compatible. Not every Smarty construct has been implemented. You can think of what has been implemented as the good parts.

Key design decisions are:

• Compile time and run time are strictly separated. When you do ->display(...), or ->fetch(...) in Smarty, many things can happen. Smarty checks if the template has been compiled, if compiled code is still valid, if cached content hasn't been hit, etc. Skrz\Templating\Engine does none of that.

• Compilation is managed by external tool. At Skrz we use Grunt to compile CSS, Javascript, and also templates in development.

• Compilation output is an autoload-able class, rendering should be encapsulated in a method. Smarty compiles templates into a bunch of functions that reside inside if statements, so they cannot be declared twice. With JIT-ing PHP implementations coming up (HHVM, PHP-NG, HippyVM), this is quite sub-optimal, because certain optimizations cannot be applied (e.g. HHVM can optimize file inclusion that only contains classes at the top level, into just populating class tables).

Usage

Skrz\Templating\Engine provides only parser and compiler. Please refer to tests on how they are used.

Basically, you just create ParserContext, parse template file, create CompilerContext, and compile into output file.

Let's say, you have template MyTemplate.tpl in current directory and want to compile it into MyTemplate.php:

$outputFileName = __DIR__ . "/MyTemplate.php";

$parserContext = new ParserContext();
$parserContext
    ->addPath(__DIR__);
    ->setFile("MyTemplate.tpl");

$compilerContext = new CompilerContext();
$compilerContext
    ->setParserContext($parserContext)
    ->setClassName("MyTemplate")
    ->setTemplate($parserContext->parse())
    ->setOutputFileName($outputFileName)
    ->dump();

License

The MIT license. See LICENSE file.