Princepawn has come up with his own framework, Seamstress, though I'm not sure how serious he is about it

Thank you for your balanced assessment of templating systems. My first question would be: have you looked at the docs and philosophy behind HTML::Seamstress? Would you agree that Seamstress is a rather unique beast in the jungle HTML templating systems? The only thing similar to it is XML::LibXML, which is based on XHTML and hence requires better structured documents. It also is not based on HTML::Tree which means that you cannot get the magnificent table-building abilities of HTML::ElementExtended

Now on to your question about my seriousness.

Seamstress originally contained HTML templating subroutines and support for preparing HTML documents for templating via a command-line tool. All subroutines for templating have been moved out to a separate tested and documented distribution, HTML::Element::Library. Seamstress is now simply compiler support for a large collection of generic tree manipulation routines, which includes HTML::Element::Library, HTML::ElementExtended and the root class HTML::Element (which is part of HTML::Tree).
I recently developed a database-driven website in CGI::Prototype (merlyn'stool), Data::FormValidator, Class::DBI, and HTML::Seamstress. If you click on any page, at the bottom is a "View source" link which gives you an idea of how Seamstress works.
I can report that I was pleased with my ability to create common look and feel by normal object-oriented programming as opposed to something like a Mason autohandler.
I am very happy with my tool and responsive to input on it's improvement. It is not a popular tool. It was well-received at the Thousand Oaks Perl Mongers meeting recently. I meant to give a talk on DFV but they got interested in Seamstress so I explained how it worked and they liked it. That being said, HTML::Template and Template, Mason, Embperl are much more popular and have much longer track records in critical corporate situations. Using Seamstress is a commitment to improving it as you need it - much as I do.

HTML::Formvalidator

I think the most popular validation module is Data::FormValidator and I am happy with its performance. You might take a look at that.

Comment on Re: Survey of Surveys on HTML Templating systems

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Re^2: Survey of Surveys on HTML Templating systems by perrin (Chancellor) on Feb 23, 2005 at 19:01 UTC
I would say Petal offers the same sort of approach as Seamstress. It's pretty mature and seems to have an active community.	[reply]
Re^3: Survey of Surveys on HTML Templating systems by metaperl (Curate) on Feb 23, 2005 at 21:50 UTC
I would say Petal offers the same sort of approach as Seamstress. I thought Petal was the same thing as Seamstress but after joining the GMANE list and reading the docs it is very different. Petal provides a mini-language. Seamstress and XML::LibXML usage is nothing but object-oriented Perl. Petal is xml-based, which is fine if you have well-done XHTML. Seamstress is based around the flexible HTML::TreeBuilder which uses HTML::Parser and can use old skool HTML with no problem. did you see my post about creating alternating table rows with Petal? The way to do that in Seamstress or XML::LibXML is vastly different and in neither of our cases involves a mini-language.	[reply]
Re^2: Survey of Surveys on HTML Templating systems by tphyahoo (Vicar) on Feb 23, 2005 at 18:03 UTC
Hi, thanks for your feedback! No, I haven't looked at the docs for Seamstress, just what I find clicking around in perlmonks. I was pretty overwhelmed by the amount of information out there and couldn't follow everything up. Maybe I'll have a closer look now. One thing that might move me to try Seamstress is if there was a dummy application with a db back end that I could just take over and mold to my purposes. Is that what I'll get by clicking the view source link as you suggest? Going to check it out...	[reply]
Re^3: Survey of Surveys on HTML Templating systems by tphyahoo (Vicar) on Feb 23, 2005 at 18:36 UTC
Okay the view source thing is cool, but what I really want is the thing downloaded in a tarbell, including db dump, where I can play with it and see if I like it. For instance, my first question is, where are the html templates? I guess they're in there somewhere, but how close to html do they look like? Close enough that I can load them in dreamweaver? If you just tarballed the whole thing you might get more people playing with it, that's what MS does with ASP.net. But from viewing the source I agree it's clean, it's nice, it looks promising.	[reply]
Re^4: Survey of Surveys on HTML Templating systems by metaperl (Curate) on Feb 23, 2005 at 22:14 UTC
For instance, my first question is, where are the html templates? I guess they're in there somewhere, but how close to html do they look like? Close enough that I can load them in dreamweaver? here are the HTML templates and as you can see, they are 100% pure HTML. Even less markup than Petal please msg me with your email so that I can give you info on getting the tarball...	[reply]


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Re: Survey of Surveys on HTML Templating systems

HTML::Formvalidator