[FX.php List] PHP Question

[Kevin Futter]

On 21/7/06 9:08 AM, "Steve Hannah" <shannah at sfu.ca> wrote:

> 
> On 20-Jul-06, at 3:51 PM, Kevin Futter wrote:
> 
>>  On 21/7/06 3:25 AM, "Bob Patin" <bob at patin.com> wrote:
>>  
>>  
>>> I don't know why I never thought to use ECHO rather than to move in and out
>>> of PHP code... !
>>>  
>>>  This is much more elegant; I'll definitely store this away for future
>>> use...
>>>  
>>>  
>>>  
>> That¹s an interesting comment Bob. I tend to go the other way ­ I try as hard
>> as I can to separate data processing logic from both structural and
>> presentational layers.
> I agree with you on this approach, as you are describing the MVC
> (Model-View-Controller) pattern.  Unfortunately PHP, on its own, doesn't cater
> all that well to MVC.  It works well for page layouts where you only have to
> drop a view variables into a largely HTML page:
> 
> e.g. <title><?=$mytitle?></title>
> ...
> 
> But as soon as you add control logic with "if" statements and loops you end up
> with a mess like:
> <? if ($condition){ ?>
>     <p>Some information:</p>
>    <ul>
>    <? foreach ($myvars as $key=>$value){ ?>
>         <li><?=$key?> is <?= $value?></li>
>    <? } ?>
>     </ul>
> <? } ?>
> 
> You can see how it would be easy to lose one of the closing braces in the
> midst of a bunch of html code.  The above example becomes:
> if ( $condition){
>     echo "<p>Some information</p>
> <ul>";
>     foreach ($myvars as $key=>$value){
>         echo "<li>$key is $value</li>";
>     }
>     echo "</ul>";
> }
> 
>  A little bit more sightly and much easier to keep track of the opening and
> closing braces.  Of course if we start putting too much html in there then it
> could become difficult to keep track of the html tags and we have the same
> problem in the other direction.
> 
> The best way to do MVC in PHP is to use some sort of templating engine like
> smarty so that this is done in a way that is easy to follow and debug in  both
> HTML and PHP terms
> 
> e.g.
> {if $condition}
>     <p>Some information:</p>
>     <ul>
>     {foreach from=$myvars key=key item=value}
>         <li>{$key} is {$value}</li>
>     {/foreach}
>     </ul>
> {/if}
> 
> Readable in both PHP and HTML terms.
> 
> However there are further considerations when it comes to PHP.   Sometimes you
> just want to display a small bit of text and this bit will be displayed
> several times - maybe as part of a loop.  You have to be careful that you
> don't reload (re-include) the template page every time the snippet is
> displayed or your performance tanks.  In this case I would tend to use ECHO
> statements over dropping out of PHP (e.g. ?> <p>my test</p> <? ) because when
> there is just a small amount of HTML code inside your PHP function, the
> readability of the PHP is more important than the readability of the HTML.
> 
> Anyways, that is just my take on the issue after years of trying it every way
> under the sun.
> 
> Best regards
> 
> Steve

I understand your point Steve, and I¹m not a zealot about it. With your
example I would indeed do it the way you suggest ­ it¹s horses for courses.
The one point I would make however is about spotting code blocks: I¹ve
recently changed using from trailing braces [ if(blah){ ] to hanging braces:

if (blah)
{
...
}

I¹ve noticed a monumental increase in code readability with this one change
alone, most especially with spotting code blocks. It helps enormously to
mitigate some of the concerns you raised about the mess of intermingled PHP
and HTML. I can thank a colleague of mine (who is a trained programmer) for
pointing me in this direction, and highly recommend it as a superior code
formatting style.

Kev (an old dog learning new tricks)

-- 
Kevin Futter
Webmaster, St. Bernard's College
http://www.sbc.melb.catholic.edu.au/



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