Experienced monks,

i am about to do some web programming in Perl, so I started to learn about Catalyst and MVC. I have some previous experience with HTML::Mason, but Catalyst uses Template::Toolkit as the first option for view components.

Why? Why is it worth to use (and learn) a different language for the template? I ask, I don't argue, because obviously many people dot it and someone even presented TT as a standard tool for web page development at Vienna.pm lightning talks.

So far I found only 3 reasons hardly applicable in our environment:

• It is language (Perl) independent. Which seems of no concern for me, since we develop all of our application in Perl (or PL/SQL :-)).
• It is safer, since the template developer has no access to naked Perl. It also seems of no concern because the template developer is me or my office mate.
• Different template languague supports the separation of the view from the model and controller. It seems a bit academic for me now.

Am I wrong? Is there any other - sound and general reason to prefer TT from Mason?

But even If HTML::Mason is the appropriate choice for my environment I can go a bit further. Why to use ANY template engine at all? Why don't use ordinary Perl for the view components?

Everytime I tried a template based development (Perl + HTML::Mason and a bit of PHP + Smarty) I ended up with quite a messy template with lots of iterations and conditions intertwined with plain text.

Where is the advantage of mason template:

<table>
    <tr><th>Title</th><th>Rating</th><th>Author(s)</th></tr>
% for $book (@books){
      <tr>
        <td><% $book->title %></td>
        <td><% $book->rating %></td>
        <td>
            <%perl>
            my @authors = $book->authors;
            </%perl>
          (<% scalar @authors %>)
          <% join(', ', @authors) %>
        </td>
      </tr>
%}
</table>
[download]

over Perl code (I use fictional function-to-html interface, I believe there must be plenty of them)?

print html_table(
    html_tr(
        html_th('Title'),
        html_th('Rating'),
        html_th('Authors'),
        (   map {
                my $book = $_;
                html_tr(
                    html_td( $book->title ),
                    html_td( $book->rating ),
                    html_td(
                        do {
                            my @authors = $book->authors;
                            scalar(@authors) . ' ' . join( ', ', @auth
+ors );
                            }
                    )
                );
                } @books
        )
    )
);
[download]