On the heels of some previous comments concerning the Smarty PHP templating engine, Quinton Parker has posted some of his own thoughts concerning the past and future of the tool.

Today's rant is about the Smarty templating system for PHP. A recent blog post by Paul M. Jones has rekindled my strong feelings against Smarty. Honestly its nothing personal. Its just I can’t believe developers are still using Smarty or that they ever started using it. Unthinkable.

Quinton talks about when he first discovered patterns and N-tier including the Model-View-Controller pattern. This naturally lead to needing a templating engine for the views, but from everything he could tell about Smarty it "solved the wrong problem" (he chose phpsavant instead). He even points out an author who, despite writing a book on Smarty, still came back and said that there's no need to use something like that in an application.