An Argument for Limited Templating

By Deane Barker
From Issue #5

Terence Parr is a professor at USF and the author of the StringTemplate templating language. He wrote a paper entitled Enforcing Strict Model-View Separation in Template Engines (PDF) in which he argues against templating anything in native programming languages.

The mantra of every experienced web application developer is the same: thou shalt separate business logic from display. Ironically, almost all template engines allow violation of this separation principle […]

Many systems allow templating in their native language (WordPress, pre-8 Drupal, anything in .NET via Razor, etc). Parr’s paper casts doubt on the advisability of this practice.

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