MySQL Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Using a Template System to Generate Web Pages

Problem

Your scripts mix the code for retrieving information from your database with the code for generating HTML. You want to decouple these activities so that they can be performed separately.

Solution

Use a template system that enables you to design the general layout of the page but plug in specific data on a request-specific basis. Then you can obtain the data separately and pass it to the template system for output generation.

Discussion

In this chapter, we’ve been using an approach that retrieves data for a web page and generates the HTML for the page all in the same script. That has the advantage of simplicity, but there are disadvantages as well, and there are alternatives.

The primary disadvantage of mixing everything together is that there is little functional decoupling (separation of function) between the logic involved in obtaining the data needed for the page (the business or application logic) and the logic that formats the data for display (the presentation logic).

An alternative approach to web page generation is to use some kind of template system that enables functional decomposition of phases of the page-generation process. A template system does this by separating business logic from the presentation logic. If you’re partial to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, templates help you implement MVC logic by taking care of the View part.

There are many template packages to choose from, as a few minutes searching ...