Power of Smarty

Hello All


I wrote to this forum/list few months back about the something interesting w
ith smarty, I thought let me again describe same thing here. 

The concept I am talking about is something different with PHP and Smarty. F
or me this was not possible without using Smarty and that’s where I am very 
much thankful to smarty. 

There are few programmers whom I know who are against smarty, they says it i
s taking extra resources andgoing away from basic concept of template system
. It is just programming in html, this is true to some extent. However, for 
me, what I could do with Smarty as explained here, is not possible at all wi
thout smarty. For me smarty is really a powerful tool 

What i wish if my concept is not worth than smarty developers can come with 
something like this....i am sure, would be really very useful in commercial 
rapid development.

Amway, my concept ‘Akaar’ has few features, which are quite new with PHP dev
elopmentlike BackFire, Client Validation, Insertion, and Layout Management e
tc.  These features can surely give pace to the development work dramaticall
y. There are lots of feature for just for example, here

BackFire

This is bit difficult for me to explain the concept behind the Backfire in w
ords; I would prefer to explain by case.

Just imagine a case, you are doing coding for a registration form in which y
ou will ask some information from your user like, email, password, gender, a
ddress, city, country etc. 

The email address filed is unique in your system and you need to validate it
.  You must validate that the email address enter by user is unique andif it
 is not you must inform user to enter different email address. 

In such case, while informing the notice to user, you would prefer to re-fil
l all the information (like city, address, gender, and country) entered byus
er so they don’t need to fill again. They just enter different email address
 and go ahead.

Now, just think, how would you do this? What is your normal way to do coding
 in such case and how would you re-filled the information entered by user wh
ile notifying the user?

I would not describe here how we do this normally, but I would surely tell y
ou how you could do this in Akaar. Just by a single line of Code, yes by jus
t single line ofcode like

$obj->DoBackFire();


That’s all; this line of codewill do all for you. It would re-fill all the i
nformation entered by user on form; you don’t require doing any coding in yo
ur template or php at all. It does not matter for Akaar what kind of html el
ement you have on your form. 

If it were select box for country then it would show the country entered by 
user as selected, if it was radio for gender, it would show proper radio sel
ected as selected by user.

For more detail information and example please visit 
http://www.php-india.net/Akaar/?op=BackFire

Akaar Value Insertion

What is this? Again, let us go by an example.

To understand this, just think of a case, you have edit profile form in your
 member area, when your user clicks on this, you want to display a edit form
 with all the information filled (Which you will fetch from database)

What we normally do for this?

Normally we will assign the value in html code like 
<input type="text" name="FirstName" value="<? =$FirstName?> ">

Or if we are using the templates then, in our template we will have somethin
g like 
<input type="text" name="FirstName" value="{$FirstName} ">

This is orthodox example of text box, if we have select box, we may have dif
ferent way to handle this, in case or radio button, it is different, in case
 of check boxes, it can be again different.

Now, What if you have single way of handling this, irrespective of what kind
 of html element you have. 

Like, if we have same way to put value in checkbox, list box, radio or texta
rea or any such input element. 

Here, Akaar helps you, you use single method to handle this and you don't re
quire writing of any code in your template or in your html code value tag. 

You just do this simply by calling setValue method. For example, in above ca
se it would be something like 


$obj->setValue("FirstName", $FirstName);

Now, your "FirstName"  can be any HTML element, it can be checkbox, textbox,
 radio, textarea, select box or even multiple select box. Akaar takes care o
f that; you don't have to bother what kind of html element it is

For more detail information and example please visit 
http://www.php-india.net/Akaar/?op=value

There are lots of other features like 
Client Validation, Layout Managment etc

For more detail information and example please visit 
http://www.php-india.net/Akaar/

Any comments ?

Thanks All and Thanks Smarty!!!