ralphm's blog

Off to Malta

Early tomorrow I'll be leaving the Netherlands for my 12-day vacation on Malta with my girlfriend. I will probably not have Net access there, so don't send me too much messages while I'm gone...

The light on the Jabber World Map will be located appropriately, and you might want to try hovering over the light. Cya!

Monday, 22 July 2002

New Cabinet

Here is some english coverage on the event.

Harry Potter for Prime Minister

Well, it's official. Jan Peter Balkenende, a.k.a. Harry Potter has been sworn in as the new Prime Minister of The Netherlands by Queen Beatrix, along with the rest of the new government. I haven't found any coverage in English yet, so I'll post that later on.

Monday, 15 July 2002

PHP + Smarty + XML = SmartyPath?

I use PHP almost exclusively for all my web stuff. Because I am a firm believer of separation of concerns I also use a template engine with PHP called Smarty, the Compiling Template Engine. My website has content coming from several places (database, html files, jabber) and it would be nice to have some common data format: XML.

XML has been getting a lot of attention by me lately, mostly because of my interest in Jabber. A few weeks ago I got Perl & XML, a great O'Reilly book. Among all useful stuff about, you guessed it, Perl and XML, there was a reference to AxKit. AxKit is a Perl based XML Application Server for Apache and one of it's features is a XML stylesheet language called XPathScript which combines aspects of XSLT with the scriptability of Perl. Really cool stuff!

So what do we have? I use PHP now, but the ideas of AxKit are really appealing. What to do? What most people in this business do: hack up something which scratches that itch. Enter SmartyPath. In Smarty it is really easy to make new template functions, modifiers, filters and other stuff, so I put together some Compiler Functions to use Smarty templates for translating XML documents, similar to XSLT, in a procedural as well as a declarative manner. It still needs a lot of work, I think, but pretty much works already. Here is an example:


<webpage>
<head>
  <title>Who is ralphm?</title>
</head>

<body>
  <section>
    <title>Who is ralphm?</title>
    <p>That would be me. <em>Ralph Meijer</em> .... </p>
    <subsection>
      <title>Pictures?</title>
      <p><img src="/images/ralphm1.jpg"/><img src="/images/ralphm2.jpg"/></p>
    </subsection>
  </section>
</body>
</webpage>

XML document


{template match="section"}{apply_templates}{/template}
{template match="subsection"}{apply_templates}{/template}
{template match="p"}{element}{apply_templates}{/element}{/template}
{template match="img"}{empty_element}{/template}
{template match="em"}<b>{apply_templates}</b>{/template}
{template match="title"}
  {if ($node->findvalue("name(..) = 'section'"))}
    <h1>{apply_templates}</h1>
  {else}
    <h2>{apply_templates}</h2>
  {/if}
{/template}

<html>
<head>
  <title>{findvalue xpath="/webpage/head/title/text()"}</title>
</head>
<body>
{apply_templates match='/webpage/body/*'}
</body>
</html>

Smarty Template

I'll hack on it some more and make it available for download later on. Drop me a note if you are interested in this little project.

ralphm.net