On 07/04/10 12:53, Richard Lewis wrote:
It's pretty likely than *any* templating system could be used to generate output offline. (A templating engine that was irrecoverably coupled to an HTTP server would be arguably quite badly designed and should probably be treated with quite some suspicion.)
Actually, since Smarty is tied to PHP which is pretty much tied to HTTP server usage (I know that's not strictly true but it's fairly typical to find it installed that way), Smarty falls into the category you'd find suspicious, but it is one of the major template engines on the PHP platform. In fact I suspect that anything PHP-based will fall into this category for the same reason - PHP can be used as a general purpose scripting language but it usually is not and is much "happier" working through an HTTP server. Perl and Python are much more widespread away from HTTP server usage so it would make sense that any template systems based on them will be equally happy away from the server.
All that said, I have an HTTP server and I'm not afraid to use it! I'm building a website after all!