Right on the tails of a new release of the Cgiapp set of libraries, Matthew Weir O'Phinney has posted a first tutorial in a series covering its usage. In this tutorial, he looks at a creating a "template switcher" for Cgiapp2-based applications.
Cgiapp2 implements a new callback hook system, which is basically an Observer pattern. Cgiapp2 has a number of registered hooks to which observers can attach; when a hook is triggered, each observer attached to it is notified and executed.
Why all this talk about hooks? Because in Cgiapp2, the various template actions -- initialization, variable assignment, and rendering -- are relegated to hooks. For simplicity's sake, and for backward compatibility, you can use the functions tmpl_path(), tmpl_assign(), and load_tmpl() to invoke them; you could also use the generic call_hook() method to do so, passing the hook name as the first argument.
To make it simpler for developers to access this templating system, Matthew created the Cgiapp2_Plugin_Template_Interface, a standardized interface for the template plugins. It's this interface that he demonstrated an example of, giving only a few lines of code (all that's needed) to switch between Smarty and Savant templating systems.
