bonjourlesmouettes

I'm trying to rebuild from scratch my CMS, Fluorine CMS. And in this process, I have to code some template engine. I thought I could do it using XML. Here's a functional schema:

Basically, you got to read the schema from right to left Keep in mind that "XHTML output" is just to make the schema smaller, because it'll be used to generate RSS feeds / export, RDF metadata, maybe some DocBook output... well, anything in XML.

There are two big kind of interaction between Fluorine and its Template Engine: namespaces and contexts.

If you're coding a plugin that, let's say, outputs "hello world" in the generated XML, you register a namespace ("hello" bound to "http://www.example.org/", eg), and you can use <hello:xxx>. "xxx" can be any XML-valid name (ie nearly anything). It's you the one who handles all the freaky "behind the scene" stuff in your plugin. You just need to register a namespace to make the Template Engine aware of your existence, and follow a very simple API: declare a static handler() func in your class (with some args).

My little baby sister can do it with ease
It's easier than learning your ABCs...

Kylie Minogue, Loco-Motion

But if you want to output some more complex stuff, using a template (eg in a menu), you need to register a context. It's more or less the same thing than registering a namespace, but it only tells Fluorine CMS to pass you everything it encounters in <caf2:template for="urn:...">. The URN is the one you registered, caf2 is Fluorine's default namespace name.

My problems comes from here: if you want to make a plugin, you have to build an internal XML tree in order to repeat it as many times as you need! Not that easy, heh? I chose to use SAX, because it fits the "line-per-line" (or linear) parsing of the template file (pure XML, using XInclude and stuff) I need... but maybe I should use DOM? Using both would be a little crazy, as it's rare to encounter both on a server... What do you think of that?