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www.it-ebooks.infoCHAPTER 19 • TEMPLATING WITH SMARTYListing 19-2. Rendering a Smarty Template// Render and display the template.$smarty->display("index.tpl");As you can see, the implementation details are hidden from both the developer and the designer,allowing both to concentrate almost exclusively on building a great application. Now that your interesthas been piqued, let’s move on to a more formal introduction of Smarty.Introducing SmartySmarty (www.php.net) is authored by Andrei Zmievski and Monte Orte, is released under the GNU LesserGeneral Public License (LGPL) at www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html, and is arguably the most popularand powerful PHP templating engine.Smarty offers a broad array of features, many of which are discussed in this chapter:Powerful presentational logic: Smarty offers constructs capable of bothconditionally evaluating and iteratively processing data. Although it is indeed alanguage unto itself, its syntax is such that a designer can quickly pick up on itwithout prior programming knowledge.Template compilation: To eliminate costly rendering overhead, Smarty converts itstemplates into comparable PHP scripts by default, resulting in a much fasterrendering upon subsequent calls. Smarty is also intelligent enough to recompile atemplate if its contents have changed.Caching: Smarty offers an optional feature for caching templates. Caching differsfrom compilation, in that caching prevents the respective logic from evenexecuting, instead just rendering the cached contents. For example, you candesignate a time-to-live for cached documents of, say, five minutes; during thattime database queries pertinent to that template are not executed.Highly configurable and extensible: Smarty’s object-oriented architecture allowsyou to modify and expand upon its default behavior. In addition, configurabilityhas been a design goal from the start, offering users great flexibility in customizingSmarty’s behavior through built-in methods and attributes.Secure: Smarty offers a number of features to shield the server and the applicationdata from potential compromise by the designer, intended or otherwise.389