With the Zend Framework nearing its 1.6 release and full Dojo Toolkit support I took some time to look up what Dojo is actually capable of. I found the DojoX Django Template Language extension and remembered my neighbor talking about why Python + Django is so much better than PHP with any other framework. So I digged into the Django template language and found that it is quite awesome.
Variable filtering and evaluation looks almost like Smarty the syntax being {{var.keyfilter2:"arg1":"arg2"}}. The logical syntax is quite different though, taking an somehow object oriented view on templates you can extend an existing template and override specific parts with your more special implementation. Have a look at the following two snippets:
This is an example of Django template inheritance:
{% block helloworld %}Hello World!{% endblock %}
::
{% extends "base.html" %}
{%block helloworld %}Hello World for Object Oriented Views!{% endblock %}
What does Django do with this second template when rendering? It realizes it inherits logic from a parent template and substitutes all special blocks for the parent ones. With a little object oriented background you can guess the result looks like this:
This is an example of Django template inheritance:
Hello World for Object Oriented Views!
So what was all the talking about Dojo being able to parse this kind of templates? If you envision a helper component that would function like this: 1.) make an ajax request to $url 2.) retrieve json object from the controller 3.) render json object with $template into container $container. The helper would know that the template is needed in this HTML response and appends it to the Dojo Helper output. A link would be generated performing steps 1 and 2, handing over the json data to the template and render the output. What do you get? Templates that can be used Client and Server side.
For example on rendering the view of your blog you can send all the comments using a specific comment building Django template script. Additionally you can also use the same template to render any new comment to the comment list using via an ajax form submit, returning the (model or form) filtered data via JSON and appending it to the comment list using the DojoX DTL parser. For non-JS browsers you can always use a <noscript> variant to render the templates completely server-side.
This generally being a cool idea since it makes developing applications with AJAX technology very easy I began to port the DTL to the Zend Framework and the whole weekend later I got a working implementation that supports at least the "extends", "for", "include", and "comment" tags. As a next task I will implement the helper for DojoX DTL and will report back on my efforts.